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Byron Hawk
Donaldson, Peter S. Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors.
New York: Routledge, 1990. 240 pp. $14.95, paper; 44.95, cloth.
In Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors Peter Donaldson regards Shakespearean films as ''texts'' to be evaluated on their own ground, not just as Shakespeare and not just as film. The methodological basis for this starting point lies in the ambiguity of authorship, for ''Authors cannot foreclose the play of unruly texts; artistic precursors, including Shakespeare, cannot determine how their works will be used or even the meanings those works may have for later artists and audiences'' (190). The inevitable and natural dissemination of texts sets the stage for the ongoing process of ''cultural appropriation,'' by which texts of the past are transformed in the present through infiltrations by, and encounters with, other texts, contexts, and ''authors.'' Since Shakespeare's plays are not rigid, absolute, unchanging artifacts of a past culture but rather texts that evolve in and remain relevant to ''modern'' contexts, each film is approached''as the site of a cultural, artistic, and personal negotiation'' (xii). Through the utilization of figurative analyses, cinematic techniques, gender theories, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and biographical studies of directors, Donaldson attempts to deal with the conscious and unconscious aspects of style and how this illuminates cultural appropriation. His predominant approach is to apply psychoanalysis not only to film characters but also to directors in an attempt to interpret their adaptations. Their experiences, it is argued, shed light on their choice of imagery. And their choice of imagery designates the convergence of the ''original'' text and the director, allowing the director to show up in the new, appropriated narrative.
For example, in '''Claiming from the Female': Gender and Representation in Laurence Olivier's Henry V,'' Donaldson examines the film's ''treatment of gender and its recasting, in cinematic terms, of Shakespeare's posing of the problem of representation,'' in as much as these two issues are interrelated (1). Olivier's film begins on a Globe stage, branches out to a historical context as the narrative progresses, and concludes with a return to the Globe stage. This maneuver allows Olivier to create the distinction between platea (the performative function where the actor/role binary is explicit--downstage/low), and locus (representational function where the character/role supersedes the actor--up-stage/high). For Donaldson, this distinction...