Part of the answer may lie in the extent to which such biographical films have in themselves become acts of literary tourism.
Moreover, these comic interpolations, which often highlight moments of frisson between past and present, also make the audiences more aware of their role as observers and travelers to a different place and time.īut why should one wish to travel to that place and time in search of the author? Two of the films discussed here, for example, make merry with Shakespeare's life in 1593, as he emerges from the gap constituted as the "lost years" by academic criticism. More controversially they also, often playfully, provide largely fictional explanatory "evidence" in Shakespeare's time for some of those gaps and blanks in the author's life identified by contemporary critics. In their depiction of the events of the sixteenth century, "his time," they work to provide "evidence" for, and of, his burgeoning talent. The films, moreover, rely upon, and indeed exploit, modern audiences' assumptions about Shakespeare's iconic status. These texts explicitly, and conterminously, in their reading of Shakespeare, see the author as someone both "of his time" and also "out of time." Often the presence of this double time enables the films to assert the playwright's genius as an author for all time. Arguably, with all filmic historical recreations of the past there are residual traces of the present, the film's moment of production and consumption, but the texts discussed here make deliberate dramatic capital out of the co-existence of different time periods. While, as Brooks Landon notes, " the primary effect of film is always one of time travel or time manipulation" (Landon 1992, 76), this essay will argue that in these particular texts, the intermingling of past and present is more overtly foregrounded, particularly through the use of comedy. In the other texts, there are similar attempts to recreate significant places and times from Shakespeare's life, although in these instances no character is designated as the time-traveller. In one of the texts discussed here, the Dr Who episode "The Shakespeare Code," time-travel is clearly the main narrative thread. It is that notion of the films as time travel, and the interaction of the past and present, that this essay wishes to explore. The texts to be discussed here appear undaunted by these challenges, however, and via the technologies of contemporary film and television offer the opportunity for their audiences, in imagination, to meet the author as they travel back in time to the sixteenth century. And yet Shakespeare offers particular challenges to those film and television makers, because while comprehensive biographical information is available, " the main deficiency in the available data consists in the fact that is public not private" (Holderness 2011, 2) in the sense that it reveals little about Shakespeare's emotions and feelings. Contemporary film and television have had an enduring fascination with the idea of the author, and this has resulted in a " marked surge in the popularity of the literary biopic" (Buchanan 2013, 4). This essay explores three filmic texts, Shakespeare in Love (1998), the Dr Who episode "The Shakespeare Code" (2007), and Bill (2015), which offer their audiences varied representations of the author Shakespeare. It also shows how these representations of time and place, and the attempt to establish contemporary connections with audiences, engages with central questions in adaptation studies about the authenticity and fidelity of texts and performance.
The discussion investigates the significance of these filmic travels through time and place and, by linking them to literary tourism, examines how these ideas are utilized to create personal and national memories. The texts considered here which explore versions of the author Shakespeare include John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998), the BBC's Doctor Who: "The Shakespeare Code" (2007), and Richard Bracewell's Bill (2015). This paper examines the extent to which "time travel" via contemporary film to the early career of Shakespeare in the 1590s has been driven by a search for images of the playwright relevant to modern audiences, whether that be romantic bard or rock star hero. And yet by the end of the twentieth century, fueled in part by the rising wave of celebrity culture, a new strategy in relation to canonical texts emerged: the resurrection of the author via the biographical film. In the latter part of the twentieth century, Roland Barthes's reader-orientated theory, "the death of the author," seemed to signal the end of biographical literary investigation. Janice Wardle, University of Central LancashireĪbstract Introduction Contexts Shakespeare in Love Dr Who - "The Shakespeare Code" V: Bill VI: Conclusion Notes References
Shakespeare in Love, "The Shakespeare Code," and Bill Time Travel and the Return of the Author: