BEYOND 13RANAGH AND THE BBC and choreographs its many scenes of violence in ways that would be familiarjlo any seasoned viewer of horror and action-adventure films. But it also draws liberally on a vividly colored triise en scene of monumental excess and surreal spectacle lifted from Fellini's Satyricon (1969) and Roma (I972)and Peter Gtoenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). The jfilm's striking conceptual apparatus is, more-ovcr,:clojsely modeled onTaymor's earlier music theater-pieces and the performance designs of avant-garde theater and dance creators such as Robert ijwison, Martha Clarke, and Pina Bausch. Taymor's indulgence in the iiirid, the unlikely, and the absurd may surely tend at times towardsjschlock (Burt 2002a). Yet the effects aimed at in scenes that include Titus's cooling, of his human meat-pies on a window-sill may also tilt; towards the campy targets (wherein the domestic coolly conflates with the horrific) that are repeatedly hit by David Lynch in BlueVeli>et(1386) and Miilholland Drive (2001), andbyjimjarrauschin his brilliantly deadpan Dead Man (1995). Even Baz Luhrmann's aesthetic involves considerably more than an abject catering to his youth audience's need for constant visual and aural stimulation, drawing as it does on influences and inspirations as disparate as the costumes worn in Sydney's annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (Donaldson 2002b: 72-3 etpassim) and the stylized violence of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). The fllm-noirish mood and atmospheric stylings of Michael Almereyda's Hamlethaik back not only to popular American films of the 1950s and corporate dramas such as Wall Street (1987), but to the brilliantly precise visual and auditory framings of Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977). The immersion of Hamlet himself in the solitary filming, playing, and replaying of video imagery in his effort to solve the mystery of his disjointed family evoke earlier films that range from Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) and Coppola's The Conversation (1974) to Sadie Benning's Pixelvision diaries (see chapter 3). The wider our field of reference, in other words, the more unstable our calculations of any given allusive effect; but with that instability comes an increasing complexity of interpretation. The films we have singled out for sustained attention not only enter into dialogue with specific Shakespearean playtexts, but into conversation with their own filmic contemporaries and forbears as well as with collateral developments in digital technology, computer graphics, performance art, and popular culture. These fntertextual conversations are as varied as the cultural matter they draw on: typically dialogic, disintegrative, collaborative, or parodic in orientation. Yet in all of these modes these films maintain a measured distance from their source-texts - even when they launch most fully into them - that reminds us we are entertaining performances, not revivals, of classic works. In this way, as we discuss in the next chapter, they help expand our understanding of adaptation as a cultural process. conceptual and critical resources revival recycling 2 Adaptation as a Cultural Process What does it mean to say that film-adaptation is a cultural process and not just a way of translating an artwork from one expressive medium into another? To use two examples from the previous chapter, we need think only of the very different forms of cultural surround that inform and invade Zeffirelli's 1968 film-adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and Lurhmann's 1996 William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Both films clearly attempt to "keep faith" with Shakespeare's tale of exuberantly youthful "star-crossed lovers" caught up in the throes of "true" love for the first time. But the casting choices, the look of the actors, and their preferred acting styles are as different from each other as Renaissance Verona is from Veroha Beach. From Harold Perrineau's transvestite "voguing" as Mercutio to John Leguizamo's demonic turn as Tybalt, we recognize from the start that these films are operating in radically different cinematic terrain. They reflect not only different ideas about Shakespeare's plays and classic works more generally, but a different cultural imaginary, that prevailing set of fantasies, values, desires, and assumptions which effectively identifies a specific cultural moment and differentiates it from other cultural moments past or to come. This is not to say that sexual role-playing, drug-taking, and youth-gang violence are more characteristic of our time than of the 1968 of Franco Zeffirelli (or the 1961 of West Side Story), though they well may be. It is rather to say that prevailing ideas, fantasies, and assumptions about sex and youth-culture take this form as opposed to the form they took, when Zeffirelli modeled the innocence, beauty, and passion of his young lovers on the youth culture of the 1960s - or when Arthur Laments and Stephen Sondhelm took their inspiration from street riots involving chicanos in Los Angeles, transposing their conception of embattled innocence to the clash of immigrant cultures on New York's West Side. All adaptations necessarily operate within their specific cultural imaginaries.1 But some also explicitly reflect on the dynamics of adaptation in this cultural key. Because so many of Shakespeare's plays have the status of classic works - indeed, have come to represent the idea of a "Classic Work" in the Western cultural imaginary - Shakespeare adaptations invite such self-reflexiveness. Of the films we just compared, Luhrmann's is the one that most explicitly takes up this invitation, as its title immediately makes clear by laying claim to and marking its distance from Shakespearean authorship. The pictograph ADAPTATION ÄS A CULTURAL PROCESS that links the lovers' names - either a Gothic cross or a +, depending on where the title appears - evokes a host of resonances that belong not to Shakespeare's playtext but to the cultural imaginary that animates this versions The pictograph suggests playground graffiti and adolescent crushes, the transposition of a verbal art into the visual field of cinema, the film's re-appropriation of religious symbols from their jdtschy half-life as commodities, and the problematic of faith and infidelity that attaches to many adaptations (Donaldson 2002b). The campy dissonance of Luhrmann's title illuminates the distance between this postmobern "copy" and its "original" while also back-handedly, pressing the point that it is only the practice of copying that creates - and confers authority on - an original (Derrida 1981:2061. In the following pages we focus on adaptation not only as a cultural process but also as a specifically film- and Shakespeare-related phenomenon. Synthesizing ideas from film theory, performance theory, and new media theory, we introduce some basic critical terms applicable to the study of Shakespeare on screen and particularly to the films discussed in this book. As we shall see, the interest these films share in the cultural dynamics of adaptation reflects changing attitudes about classic art, creativity, the relationship between past and present, and the relationship between old and new media. HI Fast-forwarding the Bard 'v.,isJ/:^.v-^^'%s;\.^\'^.:^:U'-"^ifrr;-'- A good place to begin is a moment in Almereyda's Hamlet when the film rather boldly cites the pre-existence and persistence of a play called Hamlet by showing a brief clip on "Hamlet's" monitor. As the camera pans past Ethan Hawke, seated at a digital editing station, it quotes a famous scene (Hamlet addressing the skull of Yorick) and a famous Shakespearean actor (John Gielgud). We can guess that Hamlet must have clipped the scene himself since we often see him working with such found materials. So at this moment we might say that Almereyda is "confessing" the extent to which his film is one in a series of Hamlets going back in time. Yet Almereyda's film does not pursue the question of what Shakespeare's Hamlet means to his video-cbllaging main character. We never actually see Hamlet working with the clip the way we see him working with Thich Nhat Harm's Buddhist riff on the "To be" speech that he also plays back on his monitor. Because of this, the film leaves open the question of how we are to understand that gesture backward. Is Almereyda's film a belated hommage to or after-image of the original play and later films? Or is it an image of Hamlet "now," understood to replace those earlier versions? Or do all these versions together constitute some larger, composite work that Western culture names Hamlet7. We gravitate towards the last notion: that in this brief moment the film presents itself not as a copy of an original but as a refrarning of earlier framings, an addition to a larger body of work that by implication ADAPTATION AS A CULTURAL PROCESS 27 2.1 Hamlet as a includes many Hamlets. Jerome McGann and Joseph Grigely have text series described this kind of additive versioning of classic works in terms that underpin much recent scholarship on Shakespeare performances on and off screen, and much of our thinking in this book. A work - we will call it "Shakespeare's Hamlef - is properly understood as a series of texts (Grigely 1995: 99; McGann 1983: 52). That series may include print editions, textbooks, children's versions, and graphic novels as well as non-print "texts" such as stage performances, opera, ballet, screen versions, multi-media installations, hypertext, and so on. Each of the texts in this series re-presents or re-iterates prior texts in the series, each varying from those that come before and after it (Grigely 1995, 99-100). The series that constitutes a work, in this way, should not be thought of as summable in any simple sense, as if one could add up all the different versions of Hamlet to get a sum total of potential variations that would equal "Hamlet" (1995:99) .2 Nor should we tfiink of the earliest texts in a series as originals. In the case of Shakespeare's works, the earliest play-texts usually exist in multiple versions: early print editions (quartos and the Folio of 1623); lost manuscripts from which the print editions were set; prompter's copies; performances in different venues. Moreover, Shakespeare's plays reiterate even earlier works, making each playtext a "tissue of quotations" from many genres and intertexts (Barthes 1977: 146). The tragedy of Hamlet belongs to the family of English nationalist dramas that retell Germanic histories and also to the popular genre of revenge plays. So, too, Almereyda's film belongs to the families of Shakespeare adaptation, film noir, and corporate or "Wall Street" drama, and it quotes indie video works along with Gielgud and Luhrmann's film. In this way, Almereyda's Hamlet presents itself as one of a series of texts that plays variations on a work that is not reducible to a single authorized version. The Gielgud citation is a bold gesture because it invites a reaction that updatings are usually supposed to hide. Even if we have never heard the words before, what we are watching is material that may seem rather exhausted because of its very status as classic work. Yet the fact that Hamlet comes to the most familiar material of the play - his "To be" speech - by reusing someone else's (screened) riff on Shakespeare's playtext is precisely the point. The reason that Hawke ADAPTATION AS A CULTURAL PROCESS ADAPTATION AS A CULTURAL PROCESS 29 sounds so fresh when he delivers those famous lines is that the audience hears' them being rehearsed in this layered way - accommodating the fact that we have already heard the speech repeated in whole or fragments many times.3 In this way, the film allows us to hear the speech as at once entirely scripted and performed in the moment, receiv.ed and just now invented. And we may recognize Hamlet as acting by way of repeated citation or "restored behaviors" that are part of k long history of the reuse of Shakespeare plays in Western culture (Scheduler 1985:36-7». Performance scholars think of such actions as "restored" in several senses (Roach 1996:3). They are played back (and given back) to us; they are represented as playable, repeatable givens; theV are stored up for future replaying and thus conserved for the culture; they are constituted serially, through repetition and variation. Extending the idea of a work as a text series, Grigely suggests that evdry copy, edition, display, publication, exhibit, recording, or performance of an artwork is fundamentally an adaptation, in that it reframes prior versions of that work in new environments, periods, and material, and for new purposes. Adaptation in this sense is the very mechanism by which culture transmits its classic works: unmaking and remaking them, renegotiating their meaning in specific reception contexts (Grigely 1995:32). Even anewprint edition of Hamlet remakes the play in a way that changes its meaning, in perceptible and imperceptible ways. Each modern edition composes different elements of the three Renaissance playtexts into a new, unified or multi-text version. It adds an apparatus of paratexts suited to specific readers: footnotes, introduction, historical materials, and illustrations.4 It materializes the work (using page-layout, scene breaks, jacket notes, cover illustrations, synopses, etc.) in ways that suit contemporary notions about the shape and readability of a book. And it circulates the work to a specific market of readers: high school, college, theater, Shakespeare buffs, etc. Film-adaptations expand on the verbal and visual media of print to include other perceptual tracks (spoken dialogue as well as written words, music, foley sounds, and moving images), other paratexts, and other production and post-production choices (casting and performance,, cinematography, editing, budget and marketing constraints) (Stam 2005a: 17). In such ways, works are "ontologized," Grigely explains, "contextualized semantically" or made meaningful, through a host of local choices shaped "by the temporal history that surrounds their composition" (1995:103). Thus, a "text" in any medium can be understood as a performance of a work, a relatively transient but powerful actualization that gives the work a local habitation and a name. As a series of texts, that work makes certain constellations of meanings and material available to be renegotiated in performance and reception by local users - readers, performers, artists, filmmakers, auditors, teachers, students. Thinking about Shakespeare adaptations in these terms puts some pressure not just on the question of what a particular work makes available to those adapting it, but of how these resources are negotiated in the light of earlier negotiations. In terms of actual performance by an actor, this requires something that cites his secondariness (such as the Gielgud quotation) and/or something that exceeds a mere playing of the role. Audience familiarity with Shakespearean story and language may be as much an issue in theatrical re-stagings of Shakespeare as it Is in screen reproductions. So it is useful to think about the challenges cinematic and theatrical audition share. Consider, for example, how difficult it is for someone conversant with Shakespeare to get caught up in yet another "new" stage-production of Hamlet or Macbeth. For such a playgoer, there is essentially no drama in the offing since she not only knows virtually everything about the play in question and how it will turn out, but also anticipates most of the lines the actors will speak and even how they will probably say them. Beyond the pleasure of hearing beautiful language recited, the only reason for watching may be the hope that someone will say or do something differently: will perform the roles (that is, call overt attention to their doubleness or belatedness) rather than merely play them (that is, fit into them as one fits into a well-worn seat or suit). It may seem as if only those deeply familiar with the plays could feel the pressure of belatedness, in this way. But that pressure has as much to do with the way the plays circulate throughout the culture and with a given production's attentiveness to the uncanny effects of that circulation. The conditions of mainstream theatrical production often preclude the kind of performativity we have in mind here, as does the residually theatrical conditioning of conventionally realist Shakespeare films (ranging from Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing to Michael Radford's William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (2004)). Even updated stage-productions are regularly performed in an isolated space - a theater - that separates their audiences from immersion in an everydayness that would contextualize the plays far more densely and that reflects their own fragmentary but persistent life in popular culture. But set an actor who calls himself Hamlet in a profoundly multi-mediated and updated cinematic setting - the streets of New York City, a Blockbuster outlet - and a whole world that always already contains and rearticulates Shakespeare appears before our eyes. m Citational Environments Zg^W^M CiWZ3^d^ All adaptations make their habitations not only in specific geographic milieux and media but also in citational environments: generic and cultural fields that incorporate specific stances towards source materials and rules for handling them. We borrow the phrase from W.B. Worthen, who, in applying Grigely's ideas to Luhrmann's film, observes that the film resituates Shakespeare's playtext "in a specific citational environment - the verbal, visual, gestural, and behavioral dynamics of youth culture, of MTV" (Worthen 1998: 1104). Thus, for example, we ADAPTATION AS A CULTURAL PROCESS ADAPTATION AS A CULTURAL PROCESS 31 find the distinctive presentational rules of MTV videos scripting our introduction to Romeq, as he sits alone with his melancholy musings at the ruined theater. Here the audiotracks (Romeo's voice-over, intertwining with a feature-song music track) bridge short, fast visual montages "self-consciously parading" the "perfected techniques of cinematography, mise, en scene, and editing" (Manovich 2001: 262). These jconventions arr^ very different from the citational rules applied in Al Pjacino's Looking for Richard. That film dips into brief sections of playtext, sampling it in|a way that might at first seem more discontinuous. Btit the narrative structures of theater rehearsal and documentary ensure; those fragments will be revisited and repeated - providing a sense of a "whole" experience, if not of the playtext, then of the actor's immersion and engagement with it. At the same time, documentary rules for handling received material call for some degree of irreverence, experimentation, and exposed artifice. These rules reinforce Pacino's self-presentation as someone rescuing Shakespeare - by way of the vernacular idioms of film and the investigative modes of Method acting - from the stiff old pretenses of British theater (see chapter 5). Several of the films we concentrate on resituate Shakespeare's plays in citational environments in which the history of citation itself - the cultural use of iconic works - is a long-standing concern. We find this reflexiveness at work in Kristian Levring's The King is Alive, as a group of castaways struggle their way through rehearsals of King Lear. This film relocates "good old Lear" in cinematic frameworks (the survival film, the experimental film) and in locations [the African desert, an abandoned mining settlement) that evoke a vexed history of Anglo-European narratives imposed on colonial cultures. The film tips its hand early on, in an absurdly donnish debate among the castaways about the correct source of a dance track (is it Saturday Night Fever?) and the "right" way to dance. The multiple errors and dislocations in this scene raise fundamental questions about what it means to perform received words and gestures (including those of a Shakespeare play) here and now. The film invites us to reflect on the systems of rules that govern such expression and how different heres and nows may change the way we remember and forget received matter (see chapter 7). Attention to the rules and practices of different citational environments helps us identify the complex effects of different artistic formats converging and recombining. Taymor's Titiis makes an especially clear example of such convergence. The film is organized in set pieces that do not precisely correspond to scene divisions in modern editions. Some of these are interpolations (new material inserted into the story) in the form of Taymor's "Penny Arcade Nightmares;" some are cinematic reorganizations of dramatic entrances, exits, and arcs of action (see chapter 4). These set pieces disrupt and sometimes arrest the narrative flow of the film, in spatial montages that resemble the moving tableaux of conceptual theater, where Taymor has her artistic roots. This organizing principle becomes more evident in the DVD edition of the film, where it is reflected in chapter divisions with titles such as "Prosthetic Branches" and "A Visit From Revenge." The citational rules here seem to be drawn both from the theater and from a Shakespeare we read; not as we might read a long prose narrative but in the discontinuous way that we might consult an archive of multirnedia images, like abook of Renaissance emblems. Structured around labeled entries or "chapters" and with an indexed commentary, the DVD "textualizes" the film, giving it a longer horizon of reception than the traditionally evanescent moment of its theatrical release (Burt and Boose 2003: 4). Titus is engaging in part because of the ways it negotiates these and other citational environments. Through the passage of performance, Grigely argues, a classic work is continually "unmade (as an obj ect) and remade (as a text and as memory)" (1995:33). By calling our attention to the way artworks exist in memory -individual memories and cultural memory - Grigely reminds us that they matter because they serve to anchor social networks of meaning. In this way, performance scholars have argued, texts "perform" social functions in the ritual sense of the word. A classroom edition of Romeo and Juliet, for example, serves multiple functions of social transmission and access, conferring a certain cultural status and inheritance on those who study it, along with its other possible effects and uses (aesthetic pleasure, boredom, occasions for seduction, etc.). Every new version of a work inherits the ritual functions of its predecessors to maintain specific networks of meaning, a process Joseph Roach calls surrogation (1996:3). Thus, for example, with each production of Hamlet, the paternal command to "remember me" that haunts Hamlet anchors a series of changing ideas about the relationships between fathers and sons. As Hamlet circulates through the culture, that command acquires new meanings that in turn open up newer representational possibilities and functions for a father/son relationship. Almereyda offers a contemporary filial spin on Hamlet by casting and directing Sam Shepard to convey a kind of tough-but-intimate love (grabbing his son's face, embracing him) that is profoundly different from the distant, hierarchical figures of paternity we find in Branagh and Zeffirelli. Moreover, each of these versions of paternity reflects differing ideas about relationships with the dead, about revenge, and about the nature of the afterlife. Surrogation can work at the level of plot function as well as characterization. Thus, when Jane Howell first made Young Lucius a figure who crossed fictional boundaries between past and present, in her BBC Titus Andronicus (1985), she coined a convention that would be picked up by Derek Jarman in Edward II (1991) and then fully developed by Taymor. By creating a contemporary space of witnessing, Howell added a new character junction not just to Titus Andronicus but to screen Shakespeare and other adaptations besides.5 We see this character function iriforming the moments of filial witnessing in Radford's recent Merchant of Venice, for example. The film invites us to share Tubal's horror at Shylock's sadistic obsession with Antonio's flesh, and positions us, in its final interpolation, alone with an isolated, silent Jessica (another child who has crossed world-defining boundaries) looking out oyer the \jrater that now separates her from her community of birth. The device may work differently in different films: to generate a feeling of anxious j complicity with violence and ethnic prejudice (making us ask what actions we can take now, in the light of our complicity); jor to produce the false pathos of distance from violent prejudice (letting us think how sad it is that it once had to be that way). The endirigs of both Taymor's and Radford's films can be read in both ways.6 Similarly, Othello films remind us that when ambition, love, and racism intersect we call the one who takes advantage of this intersection and tells us all about it "Iago." To perform Iagb is also to tell us what Iago's work means, now- and by reprising the role to revise and reinvent it, along with the "invisible network of allegiances, interests, and resistances," attaching to ideas about ambition, love, and race, that animate this character (Roach 1996: 39). Iago serves a particular character function that is part of the constellation of behaviors represented and restored by Othello in Western culture. Thinking about dramatic roles in this way means seeing them as fictional constructs that work in certain scripted ways in relation to each other: as operations, not separable entities.7 Where die social functions invested in a work are particularly critical or prominent, the process of surrogation by successive texts may be especially fraught, for while surrogates inevitably fall short of and exceed the memory of their predecessors they never fully escape it (Roach 1996:3). The "double sense" to which Shakespeare films in the camp mode seem to be alive is thus an uncanny sense of both embodying and displacing their primary intertexts (Sontag [1964] 1999: 57; Roach 1996:2). Applying Roach's and Grigely's ideas to Romeo + Juliet, Worthen suggests that this process of transformation through surrogation is precisely the interest of Luhrmann's film: "Citing the text - the verbal text of a play, the cultural text of Shakespeare - Luhrmann's film undertakes a shrewd reflection of the relation between classic texts and their performances, presenting this version of Shakespeare's work not as a performance of the text and not as a translation of the work but as an iteration of the work, an iteration that necessarily invokes and displaces a textual 'origin'" (Worthen 1998:1104), In different contexts and for different plays, one or the other imperative (to embody or to displace) may seem more urgent. Indeed, as we explain in chapter 6, the inability to break away from and displace character functions that have played a formative role in modern racial stereotypes often undermines recent performances of Othello. The ambivalent dynamics of surrogation are particularly pressing in Shakespeare films, which inherit anxieties about fidelity, legitimacy, and displaced origins from two gene pools: the Romantic ideal of Shakespearean authorship, on the one hand, and deeply rooted prejudices against film and film-adaptations, on the other. Much has been ADAPTATION AS A CULTURAL PROCESS 33 written about the Romantic notion of Shakespeare as a singular genius, the secular worship of the Bard, and the passion for authenticity invested in both theater and film performances.8 In citational environments where these are the dominant values, any performance of a Shakespeare play may be an opportunity for nostalgia for a lost -definitive - original, an attempt to close the distance between that lost original and the present performance. Yet, as Robert Stam has observed, a nostalgia for originals - and the corresponding sense that any "updating" is a falling off - is especially a phenomenon of film-adaptation. Theatrical adaptations regularly re-conceptualize, reinterpret, and innovate; if they fail to do so they may not be seen as successful (2005a: 15). The same tends to be true of literary adaptations of Shakespeare, as attested by Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand-Acres (2001), her free adaptation of King Lear. Both theatrical and print adaptations are more often measured on their success or failure in their own right, not - as in the case of film - on the fundamental legitimacy of adaptation as a practice. Why should this be so? Byway of an answer, Stam surveys a number of prejudices traditionally attached to film-adaptation. It is worth taking a moment to review these prejudices not only because screen Shakespeares inherit them, as all screen adaptations do, but also because they relate so closely to long-standing notions about Shakespeare's cultural legacy. Stam explains that the common sense that there are deep oppositions between film and the verbal arts is grounded on several assumptions that are themselves deeply rooted in Western culture. When the aural and verbal aspects of film are ignored, film is easily assimilated into a long Western tradition of suspicion against images, appearances, and the phenomenal world - an "icono-phobia" that goes back to Plato (Stam 2005a: 5). The converse of that suspicion is a cultural "logophilia" that privileges the verbal, valorizing the book and literature in general as the highest art-forms (2005a: 6). These twinned values reinforce the sense that the arts of the word and ' image are locked in an eternal struggle for dominance in which gains for one mean losses for the other (2005a: 4). Iconophobia and logophilia are also linked to a persistent "anti-corporeality" in discussions of film-adaptation: a distaste for the body and bodily experience that recycles basic principles of Puritan anti-theatricality. Film is often described as appealing primarily to bodily sensations, as emotionally and morally "contagious," and as feeding lower (and lower-class) appetites rather than the higher processes of reason (2005a: 6) - just as the Renaissance public theater was. In such moralizing contexts, to eschew and destroy the seductions of the image is tantamount to affuming one's true faith (2005a: 5). These and other assumptions underpin the notion of film-adaptation as a second- order art that parasitically sucks the life from the text, as it converts it to an "image" (2005a: 3-5). In the context of screen Shakespeares, these long-standing prejudices reinforce related ideas about Shakespearean authorship. Indeed, Shakespeare and Shakespeare's works have come to stand iconically for marry; of these ideas. Latent anti-theatricality remains strong in the scholarly preference for seeing Shakespeare as a poet, an artist of words rather than of the lesser realm of the stage (supposedly lesser because its a^ts are commercial, bodily, and transient]. Secular worship of the text arid book persists in attempts to produce ideal, composite editions of the plays attributed to a single artistic genius - rather than to the many hands (and minds and voices) that contributed to the creation of a play, from stage to printing house. Finally, to read, teach, own, and love $hakespeare's works remains a reliable way for both individuals and restitutions to affirm their faith in literature and Western culture more generally. The fact that a single pictographic alteration in the title of Luhrmann's film can simultaneously evoke the possibility of both faith and infidelity suggests how forcefully these dynamics converge on film-adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. McGann's notion of a work as a text series and Grigely's concept of textual reiteration as a kind of performance build directly on poststruc-turalist theory that challenges these hierarchical assumptions about the relation between different art-forms.9 Without holding us to unworkable standards of fidelity, both models of textuality help us talk about what changes - what is added and taken away - as technologies and media change, and artworks undergo the continual process of cultural recycling, recast with new settings, props, characters, and themes. These notions of textuality are particularly suited to a group of films that tend to see Shakespeare's plays as robust compendia of traces of the past, available to be recycled according to present needs and desires, rather than as objects of veneration and nostalgia (see chapter 3). Similarly, the idea of surrogation helps us think about the ways in which the social functions of earlier Shakespeare texts - plays and also previous films - are at once fulfilled and altered by these avatars. Thus, as we have seen, a film such as Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliettakes on the mantle of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, becoming the bridge between Shakespeare and a new generation, fulfilling a Western cultural imperative that each generation have such a bridge. Yet it also fundamentally shifts our understanding of how such bridges work and what they bridge to. The past Zeffirelli's film conveys seems immediate, knowable, and, crucially, unchanging; indeed, for all its lush immediacy, this is still a Verona in doublet and hose. By contrast, Luhrmann's film insists that any "past" we encounter is a feature and function of the present: variously reconstructed, repurposed, or ruined like the blasted Sycamore Grove theater, but never fixed or completed in any real sense. sssa I.-:;. Revivers and Recyclers