Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

In the nineteenth century these two plays were considered to be the most revealing of Shakespeare’s imagination. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the great German translator, thought Shakespeare’s treatment of the spirit world to be the most obvious sign of his genius.¹ In both plays, for somewhat different reasons, Shakespeare explores various related parallels between magic and theatre: in The Tempest Prospero’s magic power is explicitly theatrical in the masque he conjures up; in Dream the clowns are frightened of the effect of disguise and illusion on the gentle audience of the play they are rehearsing, and part of the fun consists of the contrast of this attitude with the power of illusion they have experienced in the forest; and both plays have an epilogue that asks the audience to notice and respond to the relationship of magic and theatre. These two plays, taken together, show that Shakespeare inherited, and worked within, at least two competing traditions of how to represent magic: one was the hucksterish trickery of early Italian comedy deriving ultimately from classical New Comedy (as, most notably, in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist); the other was the somewhat later convention deriving from Italian pastoral tragicomedy that presented magic as something for the audience to accept as “real.” In the one case the audience knows as much as or more than the gulls who fall for the trickster’s supposed “magic”: in the other the audience is in thrall to the magician and his skill apparently acquired after long study. Shakespeare experimented in his radical way with both forms in the various new dramatic genres he evolved, as, for example, in the fusion of comic intrigue and tragicomic “real” magic in Dream.

      Filmmakers have confronted this experimentation with varying degrees of awareness. Early filmmakers who turned these plays into film relished the chance to exploit the new filmic possibilities of illusion, but subsequent filmmakers, as we shall see, have often been more diffident about the supernatural or have a different agenda than simply that early celebration of the new medium in the silent era.

      Percy Stow’s splendid 1908 Tempest (from the British Clarendon Film Company), reproduced on the Silent Shakespeare DVD, has several magic scenes.² Many of them do not appear on stage in Shakespeare’s text but are simply part of the background story to a play that, uniquely among Shakespeare’s works, confines the stage action to the last few hours and tells everything else in reminiscence. The film ignores the strict unity of stage time, which binds the play tightly together. Instead it retells the story in chronological order from the arrival on the island of Prospero and Miranda, and thus we see, for example, Prospero letting Ariel out of the cloven pine in which he had been confined by “the foul witch Sycorax.” There could be no clearer demonstration of the difference between stage time and screen time: the film, though telling virtually the whole story of Shakespeare’s play (without the comic subplot and the attempt to kill Alonso), still lasts only some twelve minutes.

      Most shots of the magic scenes in the Stow Tempest are those in which Ariel appears. Played by a child actress whose name, like the rest of the cast’s, has been lost, s/he protects Miranda from the lascivious attentions of Caliban and suddenly turns into a monkey in the process. Caliban himself, however, performs no tricks. He is subject to, but not a manifestation of, Prospero’s magic. Like a stage conjurer, Prospero produces birds out of nowhere and creates the storm, in a scene eerily preminiscent of Peter Greenaway, framed not by computer graphics but by rocks and the onstage watchers, Prospero and Ariel. The storm becomes a film within a film, watched through a theatrical proscenium arch. The scene is very much like Méliès-style stage magic and clearly shows his influence. Lightning is suggested by scratches on the celluloid, and a real sea is superimposed. Then comes a sudden switch to Lumière-style filmic realism as Ferdinand staggers ashore alone. But soon Ariel is leading him around, prancing across an open field toward the camera, appearing and disappearing—both to Ferdinand and to us—and clearly delighting in being a filmic spirit and in mystifying Ferdinand. The audience, though, is not mystified, merely enchanted by the pleasure Ariel and the filmmaker obviously take in the trucage. Prospero as director may be behind it all, but his special-effects man is getting out of hand.

      If anything, the contrast at the heart of the play between Ariel and Caliban is enhanced by some aspects of the Stow film. Whereas Caliban is an unkempt local with shaggy hair and an apish gait—inspired, as Judith Buchanan suggests, by Beerbohm Tree’s elaborate stage version of three years earlier—squatting to pull up grass and eat it, the child actor playing Ariel relishes the freedom to dance and skip in front of the camera.³ The scene in which Ariel tantalizes Ferdinand by being alternately visible and invisible is cut in with another subjective point of view, Miranda’s, for whom the spirit is not there on-screen and who thus watches Ferdinand idiotically lunging at empty air. Near the end of the film we see Caliban pleading to be taken on board but rudely refused, first by Antonio and then by an imperious Prospero. The final surviving shot shows him from the rear, arms outstretched, left alone on his island. The Silent Shakespeare version of Midsummer Night’s Dream⁴ also mixes stagy acting and Méliès-style tricks. The opening scenes of the court and the mechanicals are merely theatrical melodrama, but when the action moves to the forest, filmed realistically in New York’s Prospect Park near the studios in Flatbush, we are treated to fairies flying in on invisible ropes as in a stage production, and then come the stop-action tricks. Puck especially almost has Méliès as his signature tune. The transformation scene, for example, develops relatively slowly, with no magic during the rehearsal until Puck suddenly appears from nowhere and Bottom is wearing an ass’s head. The trick is the standard Méliès one of stop-action, as is clear if you slow the film and see it shot by shot. Then Titania brings on the fairies, as if onto a stage, but Puck reports to his boss by appearing like Ariel in The Tempest through stop-action camera work. Rapidity of action is indeed the main element in the filmic characterization of Puck, he who can put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, and it is all enhanced by the sudden surprises of his appearances and disappearances. Bottom is restored to his normal shape by another magic-filmic intervention, and the lovers are all married off, in an anachronistic gesture toward the Athenian setting, by what looks like a Greek Orthodox priest.

      His boss is actually Penelope, mysteriously substituted for Oberon. This presumably satisfied a need to give the company’s other leading actress a role, but it also followed a strong theatrical tradition in the nineteenth century of having female Oberons, beginning with Mme. Vestris at Covent Garden in 1840. Mme. Vestris was a key figure in making the play once more accessible to the London stage, and her innovations lasted well into the era of film.⁵ She had already staged some fairy extravaganzas, and her marriage into the French Vestris family of ballet dancers gave her ideas for presenting the supernatural: dancing en pointe gives an expression of weightlessness appropriate for fairies, at least as they were conceived in the nineteenth century. Her productions also responded to the newly popular delight in wild landscapes notable in both poetry and painting. Her singing ability explains why she chose to play Oberon: she had already appeared in the 1826 production of Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon. She could also bring into the production Felix Mendelssohn’s music, first performed on the London stage in 1833–34 in a revival of an 1816 production of Dream by Frederic Reynolds. Instrumental and vocal music, as well as dancing fairies, became staples of subsequent productions. Special effects were increasingly practical: moonlight reflecting off watery surfaces and then slowly yielding to sunrise as the lovers awaken, returning the world of the play to daytime normality; and fairies waving tiny lamps on the ground and in the air, “till the entire palace seems sparkling with the countless hues of light.”⁶ Puck too was often played by a girl, the most famous and influential being probably the eight-year-old Ellen Terry in Charles Kean’s production of 1856. In the Vitagraph film it was the gamine Gladys Hulette. Having mostly female and lightly tripping fairies adds an extra contrast with the heavily patriarchal Athens, and it is hard to imagine that the studio was not conscious of the same-sex attraction caused by the substitution of Penelope for Oberon.⁷ In their final scene, she and Titania hold onto each other and walk out of frame gazing into each other’s eyes. By the end of the century, however, George Bernard Shaw could fulminate against the casting of an actress as Oberon.⁸ And film would soon make available new techniques for representing the fairies and the transformations.

      THE REINHARDT-DIETERLE DREAM

      The silent film