‘All a matter of scale’? – Shakespearean acting and the cinema’s eyes and ears

Abstract

The paper discusses the acting of Shakespeare’s plays for the screen, in the light of the conventional wisdom that a film actor should simply “do less.” Starting from V. I. Pudovkin’s influential work on Film Technique and Film Acting, it addresses the question of “incongruity” as a source of a sense of “staginess” in film performances. It is suggested that a degree of “incongruity” is created by the physical as well as vocal demands on the actor of speaking the Shakespearean dialogue, and by the potential unfamiliarity for audiences of dialogue that is more copious than that of most mainstream films and at the same time is in an unfamiliar idiom. Films are cited from the silent era to the present century, and the paper concludes with examples from Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet, for which the author was text adviser.