Beyond Shakespeare: Screening Early Modern Drama

Repeatedly, in Shakespeare in Love (1999), Marlowe and Webster risk upstaging Shakespeare, feeding him lines as much as they absorb Shakespeare's ideas. The film thus suggests a continuity between Shakespeare and his rivals that runs counter to the dominance it otherwise accords to Shakespeare. Beyond Shakespeare argues that the prominence of Marlowe and Webster in Shakespeare in Love is symptomatic of the larger irruption of Shakespeare's rivals into Shakespeare's screen monopoly. While scholars have concentrated on studying the spate of Shakespeare films produced during and after 'the Kenneth Branagh era', we have taken our eyes off the counter-Shakespearean, transgressive films produced in the wake of Peter Greenaway's pastiche of a Jacobean cannibalistic feast in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and Derek Jarman's 'queer' Edward II (1991).

The project investigates how early modern plays are marketed and interpreted on film and television. The research is broad in scope, considering over 30 films that range from Tourneur's 1940 Volpone to the films of Malfi and Volpone released by Stage on Screen in 2010. At the same time, tightly structured research questions and the subdivision of the corpus into three broad strands will enable a sharp focus on the often fraught relationship between early modern dramatists and the dominant figure of Shakespeare in the film adaptations of plays by Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Middleton and Ford produced in the last two decades. The bulk of the book will thus focus on how and why present-day filmmakers and audiences invoke discourses of authenticity, heritage, and/or transgression when dealing with Shakespeare's contemporaries.

Beyond Shakespeare: Screening Early Modern Drama will be the first in-depth study to analyse and theorise these films. The book will explore the distinguishing features and probe the tensions between the following strands of filmmaking:

1. Counter-Shakespeares: Like Greenaway and Jarman in the 1980s, independent art house films by Marcus Thompson (Middleton's Changeling, 1998), Mike Figgis (Hotel, 2001) and Alex Cox (Revengers Tragedy, 2003) are self-consciously iconoclastic and oppositional. Taking Shakespeare and the heritage industry as their targets, they claim an alternative lineage, from Jacobean drama to Sade and Artaud's 'Theatre of Cruelty', to justify their exploration of the extremes of human experience.

2. Theatrical authenticity: At the other extreme, Original Practices stagings in reconstructed early modern theatres have prompted Martin White's AHRC-funded Chamber of Demonstrations DVD (2009), which brings together practitioners and scholars to provide insights into the lighting and staging in a Jacobean indoor theatre. Omitting Shakespeare, White's DVD implicitly identifies authenticity with Shakespeare's rivals.

3. 'More of the same': these films stress the continuity between present-day Shakespeare-centred theatre practice and their productions of his contemporaries. DVDs of Faustus (2009), Volpone (2010) and Malfi (2010) by Stage on Screen elide differences between Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Similarly, Jacobean TV adaptations of the 1970s-1980s styled themselves on the BBC Shakespeare series and ITV's Compulsion (2009) uses the successful BBC Shakespeare ReTold format to transpose the plot of The Changeling into a present-day Asian British context.

Due to the difficulties involved in funding and marketing films of Shakespeare's contemporaries, many Jacobean films make use of recent developments in digital video technology and alternative marketing strategies. To study the material contexts for the creation of such films 'from within', the project includes collaboration with Stage on Screen and interviews with a range of film directors. Through research methods and content, Beyond Shakespeare thus challenges the boundaries of Shakespearean performance studies, mapping out a vibrant new field.

Activities linked to and arising from the Beyond Shakespeare project will impact upon three non-academic constituencies: stage and screen practice, education, the general public.

1. Impacts arising directly from the Fellowship research:

I propose to work with Strage on Screen, the production company which is behind three of the fourteen screen versions of non-Shakespearean early modern drama produced since 1994. Further productions are planned, and I have been asked by Executive Producer Philip Rees to advise the company on its choice of plays. My collaboration with the company will furthermore involve the provision of a scholarly foundation for their forthcoming productions, advice on marketing strategies, contribution to website content and the educational materials that accompany the DVDs. The collaboration will thus have a direct impact on the range of early modern plays available on DVD and will affect the ways in which the plays are produced and marketed, both in the UK and internationally. My work will thus reach and benefit a wide audience of educational and recreational users, adding value to the Stage on Screen DVDs they consume.

2. Pathways to achieving impacts beyond the Fellowship period:

An AHRC Research Network application, whose start date will follow on straight from the Fellowship period, will build on existing informal networks of researchers who will be brought together with practitioners and educators, with a view to affecting stage practice and impacting on the interpretation of the guidelines for Key Stages 3 and 4 in the National Curriculum.

Subject to the availability of the AHRC's revised Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts scheme, I will also apply for a research collaboration with acclaimed film director Alex Cox, whose Revengers Tragedy (2003, starring Derek Jacobi, Christopher Ecclestone and Eddie Izzard) was a critical success, on creating a digital video of The Spanish Tragedy. If successful, the availability of a high quality arthouse film adaptation of Kyd's play will have an impact on the wider cinemagoing public and on the availability of a new teaching resource for teachers at Key Stages 3 and 4.