Chapter 12 Shakespeare and Media Allegory Peter S. Donaldson Within the large and generically diffuse corpus of adaptations, spin-offs, backstage or biographical dramas, and other cinematic reworkings of Shakespeare’s life and art, there have been a number of films that are also concerned with media history, transitions from one medium to another, or media systems and regimes. I call these films Shakespeare media allegories when such concerns are sustained throughout the work and when they become, in effect, a second narrative in addition to the play being adapted or the story being told. 1 Such films are often also parables of authorship and cultural origin in which Shakespeare is variously present as the para- digm of authorship, as a figure for the literary past as it encounters the vicissitudes of modern and postmodern styles and technologies, and even as the patron or inventor before the fact of cinema, multimedia hypertext, and other media that were only developed centuries after his death. Shakespeare in Love may be the most widely known example. Here, scenes of writing (cued, perhaps, by the image of “the dyer’s hand” in Sonnet 111), shot close enough to see the inkpot, the quill in motion, and the bitten nails and fingertips stained by the work of authorship, alternate with scenes of performance (e.g., auditions, rehearsals, running lines, and the first public staging of Romeo and Juliet) while anachronism and word- play systematically undermine period setting, bringing the business, the lingo, the cynicism, and the “mystery” of late twentieth-century theater and London life into the world of the Elizabethan playhouse. Indeed, its virtuoso cinematography suggests an enhancement of Shakespeare’s work through the power of film to cross times, blend media, and connect lived experience to the art it inspires. A. R. Guneratne (ed.), Shakespeare and Genre © Anthony R. Guneratne 2011