Done!

Tags

Remix, research, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Movies

I’m done! My research paper has been completed. Shakespeare’s sources and Shakespearean teen film have been explored and written about… I’m glad that it’s over now and that I can now concentrate on other things again.

But it is also sad, that the course is over now, as it was very interesting and brought me in contact with many things, I haven’t been in contact with before… (blogging for example, was before that course something completely foreign for me.)

I’m looking forward to tomorrows screening of all the videos. That’ll be very interesting and funny.

This might be the last entry for a while, as I learnt to appreciate the academic blogging, but still don’t want to blog private. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll have a course in Germany, which is good for blogging. We’ll see.

literature review

Tags

Andy Fickman, research, Roland Barthes, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Movies, She's the man, The death of the author, Twelfth Night

Shakespeare’s sources and Shakespearean teen films

My research topic evolves around two central points. One is Shakespeare’s authorship, thus the question of Shakespeare’s inspiration and sources is crucial. As I will try to find out where Shakespeare got his ideas from, it is very interesting to think more about the myth of the ‘genius Shakespeare’. The other topic involves having a closer look at remixing Shakespeare in Hollywood for the making of teen films.

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica there is a guide to Shakespeare offering the reader an insight into Shakespeare’s sources. About Twelfth Night or What you will for example it says: “The original source appears to have been the story Apollonius and Silla in Barnabe Riche’s Riche His Farewell to Military Profession (1581) […]”[1] Already in this short paragraph it becomes clear, that Shakespeare seemed to have other sources than only his own imagination. How much those sources were used and what else might have influenced him, will be something I will try to find out. The question of Shakespeare’s authorship and genius will be further explored with the theory of Roland Barthes about “the death of the author” from 1967.

Barthes starts his article by asking the question of “who is speaking” in a text. Is it the author, the hero, a truth generally acknowledged? His answer is, that “[…] it is the language which speaks, not the author.”[2] He replaces the author by the language, saying that the hand of the author is “[…] detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself […]”[3]. So the author is no longer a genius producing something that has never been there, but uses a readymade dictionary of words which come from thousands of sources of culture. Applying this theory to Shakespeare would mean reducing him to what Barthes calls a “modern scripteur”, who only exists while he is writing and has no life before the work or after the work, but is born again together with every new text. As Shakespeare’s heritage is so huge and people all over the world still find inspiration in his work, it’s doubtable that you can really go as far as this, but to think of Shakespeare as a person who assembled words from different cultural contexts and meanings together in a new and poetical way might be fruitful.

In “Reviving Viola: Comic and Tragic Teen Film Adaptations of Twelfth Night” by Elizabeth Klett, Klett analyses the two movies She’s the man by Andy Fickman (2006) and Lost and Delirious by Léa Pool (2001). For my research her exploration of Andy Fickman’s She’s the man will be the more important part as it is a movie which declares very openly that it has been inspired by Shakespeare. Elizabeth Klett takes a deeper look at each movie through trying to find out in what way Shakespeare has actually been the source of inspiration and how it correlates with the original play. She says that using Shakespeare to make a teen film has three main reasons: “First, the market for films more generally has become skewed toward teenage audiences. […] Second, Shakespeare teenpics exploit certain intersections between the traditional teen film genre and the Shakespearean canon. Just as teen films nearly always emphasize romance and heterosexual coupling, many of Shakespeare’s comedies focus on love and usually end with at least one wedding. […] Third, crediting Shakespeare as a source can add legitimacy to a teen film.”[4]

Laurie E. Osborne wants to unravel in her essay “Twelfth Night’s Cinematic Adolescents: One Play, One Plot, One Setting, and Three Teen Films”, “[…] what a teen film based loosely on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, yet marketed vigorously as a Shakespearean adaptation, brings to the study of Shakespeare on film and in popular culture.”[5] She also has a look at Fickman’s She’s the man next to two other movies. Her approach on the subject is different from the one from Elizabeth Klett and therefore will be worth having a closer look at as well in my research and discussing what they have in common and where they come to different conclusions.

In my research I will write about the above sketched more deeply and detailed using Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or What you will and Romeo and Juliet as historic examples and the teen films She’s the man (Andy Fickman, 2006) and Romeo+Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996).

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[1] Enclopaedia Britannica [2009]: Twelfth Night. URL: http://www.britannica.com/shakespeare/article-9000132 (Stand: 17.10.2009)

[2] Aspen no 5 +6 [2009]: Three essays. URL: http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes (Stand: 23.09.2009)

[3] Cf. Ibid.

[4] Project Muse [2008]: Shakespeare Bulletin. URL:  http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shakespeare_bulletin/v026/26.2.klett.html (Stand: 17.09.2009)

[5] Project Muse [2008]: Shakespeare Bulletin. URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shakespeare_bulletin/v026/26.2.osborne.html (Stand: 17.09.2009)

250 word project description

Tags

Genius, Remix, Roland Barthes, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Movies

Shakespeare is considered a genius having created some of the most famous plays in history. And even though his time is long gone, people still find his work very amusing, interesting, touching and inspiring. Many people can still relate to what Shakespeare has written about, as  his topics such as Love, Hate, Friendship, Jealousy and Deceit are still up to date.  The plots of his plays have been used for many movies, sometimes only modernizing the setting (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, 1996), sometimes only using the main plot (e.g. She’s the man, 2006) and creating something new around that. What is it that people find interesting in his stories? Why do they decide to use him as a source of inspiration, as a base for their work? And why does it work, even though his plays are hundreds of years old?

Looking at Shakespeare closer also involves having a look at where he got his ideas from. Who and what influenced him? People and stories around him, topics much talked of, plays he saw or read? Or was he not only a genius in assembling words in a certain way, but instead a genius who used his imagination without being influenced by others? It will certainly be interesting to pair Shakespeare with Roland Barthes, to have a look at what Barthes has to say about genius and thus about Shakespeare’s writing and his inspiration and sources.

I will try to find out why remixing Shakespeare is so popular and whether he himself already remixed.

Shakespeare Remix – but how?

Tags

Remix, Roland Barthes, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Movies, The death of the author, the-original-never-been-thing

I’ve decided to have a closer look at movies based on Shakespearean plays and to see what parts they have used in order to tell the story and which parts have been newly added to create something new out of it. But what also interests me is that Shakespeare himself got inspired by other people, by other stories, by accounts, by things that were relevant in his time and by topics much talked of. I am not interested in a historical account of Remix but rather wanting to ask the question whether there does exist something like “the-original-never-been-thing”.  I have to think of Roland Barthes at this point, who wrote an article The death of the author in which he claims, that an author doesn’t create a new story, but that he only uses a huge background of words to arrange them in a new way. So he puts in question the genius of the author, by reducing the author to some kind of person who just writes. But I’m not quite sure yet how I can transfer that question to Shakespeare and to modern movies which use Shakespeare as a base. And besides that Barthes is only one part of the whole, but I am still uncertain what the other parts can be and how I can get all that together into one topic.