Shakespeare Bulletin (3)

Bottom's no young man, either; he's dealing with age none too confidently. His vanity betrays him twice. When, in our first view of him, he looks at his own reflection in a shop window, it is to reassure himself that he is still attractive to the young women of Monte Athena. After he is doused with wine, only one of his supposed admirers even registers regret, much less sympathy. He doesn't learn from the episode, however, since he admires himself--and a distracting top hat--in the magic mirror that Puck provides on the top surface of a tree trunk; while his head is covered by the elegant hat, the donkey's ears and hair can sprout relatively undetected. (There is an interesting parallel with Oberon's ability to distract Titania's lone sentinel by handing her a mirror.) Bottom's--and Kevin Kline's--graying body hair are not transformed, but clearly the love-flower is being credited with Viagra-like properties. His grand arousal certainly impresses Titania and her train, inspiring unaccustomed ardor in her. As they make love, she asserts herself, starting on top, and keeping him inarticulate. During this encounter in the forest, he need no longer rely on his ability to perform on stage; he performs admirably elsewhere. Afterwards, in a world where age and disappointment call for imaginative compensations, he finds his manhood confirmed by the "Dream" which turns out to have actually occurred. Hoffman's film supplies Bottom with a fairy crown that survives his translation back from monstrous form; in its now reduced size, it can serve as a ring. Hoffman's published screenplay makes the significance explicit: originally, Titania was to have appeared at Bottom's window in human dimensions and slipped the crown onto his finger, "like a wedding ring" (114). While the finished film limits her appearance, it still provides the reassurance of her visit; Bottom clearly understands now the reality and importance of his previous encounter with Titania. Now, as director Hoffman has said, Bottom's "life is touched by magic and love, and there's a sense at the end of the film of a real longing after that" (LoMonico 10). No hint of reconciliation with Mrs. Bottom is offered, however: the vision of marital existence offered here strangely parallels Early Modern anxieties (such as those dramatized by Much Ado About Nothing and Love's Labors Lost) evident, as Mark Breitenberg describes it, in "the way in which romantic love is construed by patriarchal thinking in terms of loss and fear" (147). Whereas Shakespearean playtexts regularly problematize such thinking, Hoffman's film utterly identifies with its latter-day equivalents. There are, inevitably, loveless marriages--if only for men--but there remain affirmations for such menfolk, apparently, in the "creative" realms. Bottom is, after all, wedded to the Fairy Queen.

He is also, by that time, an honored performer. Much in the Branagh vein, Hoffman makes his aristocrats gentle rather than arrogant. The men are well-disposed to the Mechanicals, keeping any unkind comment about the performance sotto voce (although Bottom does hear one or two, without taking offense) and making sure to include their new wives in the conversation: the playtext, by contrast, features constant heckling of the actors and conspicuous silences from all the brides but Hippolyta. In the film, the transferred lines are prefaced by a reassuring wink from Hermia, aimed at Snug. The entire wedding party is intent on reassuring the Mechanicals, who suffer debilitating stage fright. The line announcing that "our play is preferred" (4.2.39) is given to Quince, who almost faints at sharing the news; Bill Irwin's Snout, as Wall (in a clever bit), almost climbs the walls in attempting to escape; Gregory Jbara's Snug goes so far as to remove his lion's mask, so as not to offend the ladies. Along with general anxiety provoked by the conditions of performance, Hoffman emphasizes the anxiety that Sam Rockwell's Flute experiences at playing "the woman" and that others may feel at playing with a man who plays the woman.

As Flute struggles to sustain a high-pitched falsetto in the face of audience laughter (especially the reaction shots of Demetrius and Lysander), he also stumbles over the line about kissing "the wall's stones." At the same time, the film shows Snout looking very worried about Pyramus's sword, which is aimed directly at Snout's crotch--all of which is unbeknownst to Bottom in his ecstasy of overacting.

The Mechanicals' play resolves and succeeds by virtue (if I may say) of Flute asserting his male identity. During Thisbe's final speech, he gradually returns to his natural voice and removes his wig. The quiet delivery of the lines as a male commands immediate respect and empathy from the audience, despite the patent ridiculousness of what his character actually says:

These lily lips,
This cherry nose,
These yellow cowslip cheeks,
Are gone, are gone:

Lovers make moan;
His eyes were green as leeks.
(5.1.330-35; Hoffman 107)
But it doesn't much matter what men say in this film, as long as they say it with sufficient sensitivity and sincerity.

It also doesn't much matter what the playtext says, either. Hoffman's anxieties about the verbal text of the play figures prominently in the first "audience" with Theseus. With the help of a secretary, Theseus consults a folio volume in order to support Egeus's initial demands. The book, for Hoffman, emblematizes the law, stern and harsh (Buhler 185)--and likely upsetting to audiences. It's no wonder, then, that Hoffman never has Theseus return to it or any other text. In the published screenplay, Hoffman somewhat paradoxically associates any written text with deep discomfort: "Theseus glances at the book--not his favorite part of the job" (3). The playtext, too, is clearly thought to be limiting, binding, off-putting; with such an interpretive framework, it's no wonder that Hoffman endeavors either to "sweeten" the play (no onions or garlic, please) or to contradict it outright. But in so doing, Hoffman ignores how the playtext opens itself and the dynamics it depicts to critique. Referring back to it is not necessarily a "forestalling" or "privileging" move, although some scholarly critics, as well as film makers, have recently suggested as much. Terence Hawkes's salutary suspicion toward an unduly "text-based" approach to the play is, at times, curiously uncritical in its valorization of what Robert Weimann terms "disfigurement": performance strategies that "may produce a special kind of 'deformative' effect by somehow adding to, interfering with, or 'bending' the text so that it begins to impart a different, perhaps almost contrary, sense to that which it overtly proposes" (Hawkes 112; see also Weimann 83-88).

Hawkes here presumes that such interference is necessarily liberating, an "explosive, propulsive conjunction" (113) of practices and meanings. Moving from performance to pedagogy, Laurie Osborne has judged factoring shooting scripts and published screenplays into classroom considerations of film excerpts as "another form of privileging text over film" (230), rather than seeing the multiplicity of texts as conducive to a multiplicity of interpretive perspectives. In a similar vein, C. W. Griffin (99) takes issue with Catherine Belsey's distinction (152) between the openness of verbal texts such as Shakespeare's plays and the relative fixity imposed by a cinematic interpretation. Griffin is right to point to the subsequent openness of the film's text to interpretation, but he somewhat misses the point that Belsey makes: what leads to the film's text, at least at times, is an arbitrary decision about what is going on in the source text. Belsey may be overstating her case in suggesting that filmic readings of source texts are necessarily delimiting, just as directors such as Hoffman (and at least a few academics, at least some of the time) are wrong in fearing the text itself to be fixed: it is, I would suggest, possible to create a film that establishes a dialogue between a playtext's openness and a film's own capacity for inviting multiple readings.

In the case of Hoffman's film, the visual text seeks either to dominate the verbal text or at least to distract the audience from it. The visual echoes from other films tend not to draw viewers back toward the text, but away from it. The disjunctions between what's said and what's shown continue in the same vein. There are numerous visual echoes in casting: Christian Bale appeared as the Tavern Boy in Branagh's Henry V; Dominic West was Richmond in the Richard Loncraine and Ian McKellen film of Richard III (in which emblematic nakedness was also deployed); John Sessions, who plays Philostrate here was Branagh's Macmorris in Henry V and the flamboyantly cross-dressing Terry DuBois in A Midwinter's Tale. There are several visual echoes in setting, beyond the Chiantishire of Branagh's Much Ado: the vision of the Changeling Boy on horseback derives from the Warner Brothers Dream, as do many of the fairies that have their origin in Henry Fuseli's eighteenth-century illustrations (and who co-exist very uneasily with the pixies of Sir John Waterhouse). There are visual and conceptual borrowings from Adrian Noble's production of Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company and for Britain's Channel Four: visually in the presentation of Titania's bower and the use of fin de siecle details; conceptually in the focus on questions of male identity, which were far more appropriate in Noble's staging given its use of a boy-child's perspective as the frame of reference. The associations with Ally McBeal that the casting of Calista Flockhart necessary invoked at the time of the film's release similarly drew attention away from the play's interrogation of women's place in Early Modern (or present-day) society (Lehmann 267).