ABSTRACT
Shakespeare is deeply inscribed in the table of filmic memory. From the early days of cinema, his plays have been performed for the screen and this has contributed to keeping their memory alive, constituting what is now considered an on-going history of Shakespeare on screen. 1 This history includes several ages, from the age of silence to the digital age, through the Olivier, Welles and Branagh eras or the fin de siècle moment, and from a UK/US and European scale to a global scope. 2 Shakespeare inspired several hundred silent films in the USA 3 and in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, when cinema strove for artistic legitimacy by exploiting the playwright’s cultural status. Paradoxically, in those days, transforming Shakespeare plays into filmic objects consisted in overlooking and, in fact, forgetting his texts. From the silent movies, which Judith Buchanan has called back to collective memory by reconstituting the conditions of their production and performance and by making them accessible, 4 to Justin Kurzel’s recent Macbeth (2015) which inscribes flashback, trauma and memory at the heart of the play, the history of Shakespeare on screen invites researchers to interrogate the complex relationship between Shakespeare, memory, film and performance at a time when digital Shakespeare fosters forms of both hypermnesia and amnesia. On the one hand, we have – or will soon have – access to every single Shakespeare film that has been released worldwide as well as to ever more numerous film recordings of live theatrical performances, which will allow us to remember everything; on the other hand, the digital age precisely allows spectators not to remember by making all filmic materials available online or on DVD, meaning there is no need to remember them, since we have them at our fingertips. As Katherine Rowe documents the complexities of the relationships between technology, memory and film, she rightly asserts that ‘The communications and storage of media we depend on to shore up the past, also ruin it’. 5
