Shakespeare ... with additional dialog.(Shakespeare in the Cinema)(adding words to Shakespeare's works)(Panel Discussion)

My title, of course, alludes to the famous story that the first Shakespeare film of the sound era - the 1929 Pickford-Fairbanks The Taming of the Shrew - carried the credit "With Additional Dialog by Sam Taylor." Unfortunately, this delightful demonstration of Hollywood crassness simply isn't true. Sorry, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus (for the record, the actual screen credit reads, "Adaptation and Direction by Sam Taylor").

The story does, however, point to an interesting fact: directors of Shakespeare films, like Taylor, cut, adapt, rearrange, reassign speeches, choose bizarre settings, do all sorts of things to Shakespeare's texts; but they are extremely leery of adding their own words. Given the length of a Shakespeare play, the director - unless he's Branagh - is more concerned with getting rid of words; most films cut a third or even half of the lines. But far more actively intimidating is simply the quality, and the reputation for quality, of Shakespeare's words, that needs must give pause to tacking on one's own verbiage. It's surely not going to be as good as Shakespeare's, and its proximity to Shakespeare's will probably highlight its inferiority. Zeffirelli made a graceful joke of the constraint by including in the titles for his The Taming of the Shrew (1967) an appreciation to "William Shakespeare, without whom we would have been at a loss for words."

But the constraint is real; so real that Russell Jackson, the textual consultant on Branagh's Hamlet, confessed "blushingly" to writing dialog for a couple of the "flashback" inserts (Shakespeare Bulletin, Spring 1997). The point was simply to give the actors playing, for instance, Fortinbras and Norway, something to say, even though it is "heard only fitfully," according to Jackson (and unheard according to me). Still, he blushes at his own temerity.

Shakespeare's language intimidates, and although almost all filmmakers do in fact add a little something in the way of words, almost nobody adds more than a little. And since it's so little, what and why are usually of some interest.

Sam Taylor, allowing him courtesy auteur status, is the founding father; not that by any means his Shrew challenges serious critical attention. It was preeminently a film about Doug and Mary, the uncrowned King and Queen of Hollywood, starring together for the first (and only) time, and taking on sound and Shakespeare for good measure. Probably, it was the only Shakespeare film ever made in the expectation of being a box-office smash. Still, even in this context, Taylor, like every other director, had to face up to the inherent difficulties of dealing with Shakespeare's language, including the problem of what and how much might be added. However primitively these determinations were made, they provide a pretty good paradigm for what later directors have done.

The little he added is of three kinds. First, there are a couple of bits of original dialog: Pickford, after accidentally beaning Fairbanks with a stool, moans, "Oh, Petruchio, beloved." Second, he borrowed from another "text": Mary twice mutters (with surprising menace) a line from David Garrick's eighteenth-century adaptation Catherine and Petruchio, indicating her intention to dominate him. And, finally, Taylor interpolates a song; his full cast celebrates at the end with "Drink. Drink merrily." This is, remember, a very early sound film, and there is a commercial point to showing off the voices.

Under the first of these categories - "additional dialog" proper - later directors usually make only very small additions, and usually for very small local effects. In Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), Joe E. Brown was allowed a characteristically infantile wail, "I won't play anymore," and in Laurence Olivier's Richard III (1955), Pamela Brown, after considerable silent slinking as Jane Shore, was given a single line: a seductive "Good morrow, my lord."

Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971) got something of more significance out of the rebel Thane of Cawdor's defiantly contemptuous "God save the King!" as he leaped to his death rather than wait for Duncan's hangmen. Polanski's Duncan has a nasty streak, the rebel thane has courage and presence, and, in the film's brutal world, good and evil are seldom clearly distinguished.

One would think Kenneth Branagh's full-length Hamlet (1996) hardly needed more words, but there are a couple of snippets, in each case linked to a character who, according to Shakespeare, is off stage at the time. Ophelia reappears as Hamlet is taken into custody (Act 4, scene 2), and her cry "My lord!" is, in the screenplay, the last words spoken between the lovers; and in the following scene, Hamlet whispers "Stay" to Horatio as he is led off for the…