Dal, the bard and the big screen

Course examines difficulties of turning Shakespeare into film

Instructor Dr. David Nicol explains a scene from Julie Taylor’s version of Titus. (Photo: Katie Ingram)

"Fair is foul and foul is fair" in the work of William Shakespeare as it's studied from a cinematic point of view in a new course at Dalhousie University.

David Nicol teaches a course called Shakespeare and his Contemporaries on Film, which is offered by the school's theatre department.

Part of Nicol's job is to teach a combination of film and theatre classes, but he wanted to combine the two genres under the heading of "performance studies."

In the process, he developed a course where students study and analyze the difficulties directors, screenwriters and actors have when trying to adapt the Elizabethan plays for the screen.

Shakespeare in the movies

Many of Shakespeare's plays have been turned into film, the semester-long course can only study about 10 of them, ranging from Roman Polanski's Macbeth to Julie Taylor's Titus.

Since the works were originally intended to be performed on stage, parts of the text were interpreted differently or changed for the film version. Nicol says many of the areas that present difficulties include an actor's performance, visual differences between film and theatre, and how the story is modernized.

"The fundamental issue at stake is that Shakespeare's plays are arguably uncinematic, at least on the page," says Nicol "There's a lot of problems when people try to transfer them in a faithful way when they originate as Elizabethan stage plays."

Second-year student Patrick Blenkarn agrees. Besides being in this class, he has taken a variety of film and theatre courses and he finds that filmmakers can't always be faithful to the texts. There are certain changes that have to be made, such as cutting a scene or line.

"It shows you when a Shakespeare play is put on the screen, it cannot be the same. It doesn't work as a film to be on screen if you're treating it the same way as you treat a play."

While Nicol's course analyzes the difficulties the text presents to filmmakers, using films to study Shakespeare is not uncommon.

Films help understanding

John Baxter teaches the English department's Shakespeare course and, while his class is text-based, he sees films as tools to help students understand what they have read.

"I don't investigate very consistently what films do, but I do use them to supplement my class," says Baxter. "If we're talking about a scene, I'll show a scene. I often select kind of crucial scenes and it facilitates the discussion."

Even though Nicol's course is taught differently from Baxter's and has a different goal, he wants students to develop a deeper understanding of the way a story works or doesn't work when being transferred from stage to screen.

Nicol, who comes from a theatre background, says Shakespeare's work shouldn't be seen as a finished piece of literature that can't be altered.

He says it should be seen as something "you want to get your hands on, and get dirty with, and actually go through the process and transform it into the living, breathing thing on stage."

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