Movie Essays - Narrative Holes in Films of Shakespeares Plays

Narrative Holes in Films of Shakespeares Plays My subject in this essay in playtexts and in films of those playtexts. Drama offers the storyteller a simple choice about how to communicate each element of the story to the audience show it, or have a character describe it. Often in drama narration is used because an event cannot be shown, but occasionally telling is used when showing is short possible and Shakespeare uses this device self-consciously to draw attention to the medium rather than the message of his story. Shakespeare appears then interested in ekphrasis, which the Oxford Classical Dictionary calls an extended and circumstantial literary description of any object, real or imaginary (Hornblower & Spawforth 1996) but which is commonly used in the more precise sense summarized by have F. Scott as a verbal consistation of a visual representation (Scott 1991, 301). In Shakespeares Much Ado About Nothing there is an important jumble in the narrative which has been placed there by the dramatist. The moment when Claudio and Don Pedro witness a sign of Heros infidelity is only anticipated and recalled in the play, not shown. First Don John promises Go but with me tonight, you shall see her chamber window entered (III.ii.102-3) and in the next scene Borachio brags how he brought Margaret into the deception She leans me out at her mistress chamber window, bids me a thousand times good night (III.iii.140-2). Between III.ii and III.iii the deception takes place without being shown to the audience. It certainly would have been possible for Shakespeares stage to represent Borachio entering or leaving the bedchamber, so we should consider why Shakespeare chose instead to use dialogue referring to t... ...Laterna/Athena/RSC.Greenaway, Peter. 1991. Prosperos Books. Motion Picture. VPRO Television/Camera One/Le Studio Canal+/Channel Four Films/Elsevier/Vendex/Cinea/Allarts/NHK/Palace Pictures/Penta Films.Holland, Peter. 1995. The Shapeliness of The Tempest. Essays in Criticism. 45.3. 208-29.Hornblower, Simon and Antony Spawforth, eds. 1996. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 3rd edition. Oxford. Clarendon.Jarman, Derek. 1979. The Tempest. Motion Picture. Boyds.McGuire, Philip. 1994. Shakespeare The Jacobean Plays. English Dramatists. Basingstoke. Macmillan.Scott, Grant F. 1991. The Rhetoric of distension Ekphrasis and Ideology. Word and Image. 7.1. 301-10.Shakespeare, William. 1899. Much Ado About Nothing. Ed. Horace Howard Furness. New Variorum. 12. Philadelphia. Lippincott.Wilcox, Fred M. 1956. Forbidden Planet. Motion Picture. MGM