Introduction

Lisa S Starks

    This second special issue of Post Script on Shakespeare and Film--''Derivatives and Variations''--attests to the diversity and ubiquitousness of Shakespeare on screen. As a companion issue to the first, ''Adaptations,'' this collection of essays investigates the troubled alliances between Shakespeare and cinema, addressing particular films that highlight these connections through intertextual variations and innovations in genre, media, and style. The articles in both special issues stress these features as well as those of interpretation in performance and the uses of Shakespeare in the history of film.

Although I have divided these issues according to genre, I do not wish to imply that a clear-cut distinction exists between film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays and those generally labelled as ''derivatives,'' ''off-shoots'' or ''loose adaptations.'' Underlying such a position is the assumption that an authentic, essential Shakespearean text exists as an autonomous, transcendent work, which can then be unproblematically translated into the cinematic medium. The essays that follow question that belief, as has current scholarship on Shakespeare and film. As Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burtexplain,

In the wake of the recent shift from literary studies to cultural studies, few critics now believe that representations can be vehicles for universal truths divorced from the time and culture that created them. Rather than divide an original Shakespeare off from subsequent adaptations, critics are now more likely to deconstruct that opposition, to see the first production simply as part of a continuum that encompasses all subsequent versions, including even heretical ones that unapologetically rewrite the Bard.(1)

Similarly, a primary goal of these two issues is to destabilize the binary of ''pure'' adaptation/''corrupt'' deviant, and in so doing radically challenge the authority of the Shakespearean text itself and critically examine the relationship of Shakespeare to the cinematic signifier.

Either by consciously distancing themselves from the playtext (Prospero's Books, My Own Private Idaho) or by re-producing Shakespeare in divergent modes, genres, or styles (Angelic Conversation, Animated Tales, the Gade/Nielsen Hamlet), these ''derivatives and variations'' foreground their own medium and underscore their relationship to ''Shakespeare'' and all this word signifies: high culture, humanistic values, and particularly, live theater itself. In response to their encounter with the arbitrariness of this sign ''Shakespeare,'' these films tend to...