When transposing to the screen a work written for the stage, a director is required to make certain choices in re-interpreting the play for the movie format. The greater flexibility and freedom of movement granted by the movie camera carry the potential for a product vastly different from anything possible on a stage. This freedom gives the director of a stage-to-screen project a much wider range of choices than those available to a stage director, each of which has its own impact in determining the overall impression of the picture. In this paper, I will discuss the various choices made by the directors of two stage-to-screen comedies, William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and the effects of those choices in presenting a successful comedy and in converting a work written for the stage into film.

The goal of any director, for stage or screen, is to translate the written word into visual terms for an audience. A good director must therefore know his audience and interpret accordingly. The varying techniques used by these two directors may be attributed in part to the different level of detail in the stage directions as given by the playwright; Shakespeare's stage directions are sparse and scattered, forcing the director to write his own, while Wilde's are abundant and detailed almost to the point of being intrusive. But even more influential to the directors' choices may be that they were aiming their films at two very different kinds of audience, a point I shall address further after a discussion of the two films.

I found this film version of The Taming Of The Shrew altogether disappointing as a comedy, for several reasons. The two main factors involved, as I see it, are the director's interpretation as a whole, and the director's use of the film medium.

Comedy, in Shakespeare's time even more so than in current times, is essentially corrective. Therefore, it is essential that the characters who are given "correction" in the course of the play be the only ones who are presented as ill-behaved. On this level, the film fails as corrective comedy, as other characters are given perfectly happy endings despite their equally bad (or worse) behavior throughout the play. Petruchio, for instance, winds up married to the now tamed shrew, a Katherina who will do whatever he says, when he has done nothing to earn this happiness ¾ unless we are to believe that there is nothing wrong with his conduct throughout the course of the film, an assumption which may be plausible in the text but is unthinkable in this movie version.

Rather than the clever strategist and witty (if greedy) charmer described in the text, this director's version of Petruchio is a drunken, coarse barbarian, avaricious enough to be duped by his "friend" Hortensio into trying to woo the hellcat Katherina, and bully enough to slap some good manners into her. There is nothing terribly impressive about his "taming" of her, either, since Katherina herself is presented, not as a strong-minded, intelligent woman who might present some challenge to a thinking man, but rather as a spoiled brat who only needs a good spanking to make her behave. This Kate is weak and cowardly, putting up a tough front but withdrawing instantly when faced with any real challenge; even her father's reprimands make her retreat with a last few spiteful words, rather than her fearless (and significantly longer) upbraiding of him in the text. It is evident by the end of their first meeting, wherein she first flees Petruchio and is pursued by him throughout the house only to break down and cry in front of him, that her proud-seeming spirit has already been broken. Throughout his later "taming" of her, he shows her no affection that is not tinged with sarcasm and mocking, and in fact once he has obtained the dowry shows little interest in taming her at all; while in the text the newlyweds walk into Petruchio's home together, whereupon he begins a great show of solicitude towards her, in this version he leaves her behind on the road back to his home, and in his glee at his newly acquired wealth seems to have forgotten about her altogether (until she shows up at the door with ice forming up in her clothes and hair). Petruchio is generally portrayed as even more contemptible than the clowns of the piece, the cowardly Hortensio and the "pantaloon" Gremio. For this Petruchio to be victorious at the end is counter to any corrective form of comedy.

No one in the film is really presented sympathetically; there is no one the audience can like, and therefore there is no victory at the end in which we can take any pleasure. We are denied even a sense of Petruchio's own pleasure in his conquest, as his small speech near the end about his newfound "peace...and love, and quiet life, / An awful rule and right supremacy, / And, to be short, what not that's sweet and happy" (5:2:108-110) is cut. We cannot even like Bianca, with her injured innocence and her demure obedience, because we are shown right from the outset that she is dissembling so as to be favored by her father and her suitors; for once, we can sympathize wholeheartedly with Katherina, in her vicious mockery of the "pretty pet."

Worse yet is the fact that virtually all of the "high comedy" in the text, the witty banter, the puns, the clever misunderstandings, are omitted ¾ or eclipsed by "low comedy" in the form of slapstick buffoonery. The first bout of verbal fencing between Katherina and Petruchio is cut to just over half its length, and is obscured by a chase scene wherein Kate tries one thing after another to get away from Petruchio, all to no avail. While in the text the banter clearly sets them as evenly matched, in the physical struggle onscreen Petruchio's upper hand is established from the first; instead of outmatching Katherina's wit, this Petruchio simply overpowers her and literally twists her arm to get her to smile at him. The audience is meant to laugh at the chase scene, as farcical as that in any Warner Brothers cartoon, rather than at any wit displayed by the two in their repartee. When Petruchio delivers the line "Why doth the world report that Kate doth limp?", the director feels compelled to have Kate twist her ankle and be literally limping, interpreting the line as mockery rather than playful compliment ¾ and not terribly clever mockery, either.

Likewise, Petruchio's berating of his servants misses its point completely, as the servants are played as genuinely clumsy and incompetent; his speech about his plans to find "some undeservèd fault" in everything, while giving the impression "that all is done in reverent care of her [Kate]," is cut to the single line "This is the way to kill a wife with kindness" (4:1:193 and following), and again his cleverness is reduced to contemptible bullying. The "knock me here" scene with Grumio is likewise cut short, with the few remaining lines run through so quickly and so obscured by background noise that the wordplay is utterly lost; Grumio is shoved aside and ignored when he begins his explanation of the misunderstanding, and we never hear him say "And come you now with 'knocking at the gate'?" (1:2:5-42) The scene with haberdasher and tailor (4:3:61-181) is cut almost completely, presumably in the belief that the pudgy haberdasher fainting and Petruchio tearing up the dress will be more amusing than the full text of the argument between the tailor and Grumio, complete with puns and elaborate threats. An even worse flouting of the script is the fact that later Katherina appears at her sister's wedding feast in full Elizabeth Taylor splendor, wearing a dress more elaborate than the bride's ¾ a far cry from the "honest mean habiliments" in which they were to leave the house, negating the entire point of the scene. "Snip and nip and cut and slish and slash," indeed.

The director also chose to include a great deal of nonverbal low comedy, much of it on a "fall-down-go-boom" level: Katherina falling off her horse and being laughed at by Petruchio, Petruchio's servants tripping over each other in their haste to prepare supper, Tranio bumping into and being swatted by a washerwoman, and so forth. None of this is even implied in the text. The comedy is largely unsubtle, playing entirely to the groundlings, and some of the characters are no better, laughing at their own jokes more often than not ¾ a vice that Shakespeare himself, through Hamlet, criticized rather sharply. (Richard Burton as Petruchio in particular brought to mind the relevant lines: "...And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too...that's villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it." --Hamlet, 3:2.)

Many of the visual comic additions served little or no purpose because they were not carried throughout the story. Tranio's gawking at the large buxom woman, for instance, might have been amusing if this character note had been carried through the film ¾ say, if Tranio had shown a consistent penchant to chase after large women, a minor character trait comparable to Algernon's constant eating in Earnest ¾ but as it was, what could have been a mildly amusing running joke was given instead as a one-shot gag, too flat to be worth the setup. The opening "carnival" scene is quite effective in portraying Lucentio as a country bumpkin overwhelmed at being in the Big City, but Lucentio becomes such a marginalized character after the introduction of Petruchio that the character note is essentially wasted. The scene might have been worthwhile in comic terms in giving the audience a chance to snigger at the wide-eyed Lucentio, if the carnival atmosphere had been less excessive; as it is, the audience is equally shocked ¾ even disgusted ¾ and is given no opportunity to laugh and feel superior.

On a more technical level, one thing I found particularly irksome was that the characters repeated their own lines from time to time ("Will you, nil you, I will marry you", "I'll see thee hanged on Sunday first", "before I have a husband to the elder", "Conformable as other household Kates", "Thrive and wive", et cetera). The overall effect was to give the impression that the actor had forgotten his next line and was repeating his last, or that another actor had missed a cue the first time the line was spoken. I have no idea why the director chose to use this technique, particularly since there were several lines added where the director felt it necessary: Kate cries "I'd rather die!" when Petruchio announces that he will tame her, a line that appears nowhere in the script, and the conniving Hortensio repeats "Wive, said'st thou?" before inviting Petruchio into his house to lure him into wooing Katherina. Since the director is clearly not averse to inserting lines of his own, I see no reason for using Shakespeare's lines more than once.

Overall, the film version deviated wildly from the script, most of the time to ill or no effect; ignored higher comedy in favor of the pratfall and the laugh track; and presented nearly every character in the most unfavorable light possible. The story as directed was neither corrective nor enjoyable. All in all, a profoundly unsatisfying comedy.

Watching The Importance Of Being Earnest was a welcome change after sitting through Shrew, and would have been no less enjoyable without the unpleasant contrast.

The movie's introduction, with a well-dressed couple coming into an opera house to watch a play called "The Importance of Being Earnest" and the credits shown on a playbill, struck me as having a self-conscious cleverness very similar to that shown by both the characters and the playwright throughout. Shrew dispensed with the Christopher Sly play-within-play introduction, perhaps not wanting the story to be taken as a "play," but Earnest takes to heart Wilde's subtitle, "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People," and deliberately presents itself as just that, a play; this is not a True Story, just an evening's light entertainment, in keeping with the text's delightful refusal to take anything (including itself) seriously.

While both plays made use of the fact that they were on screen rather than stage, having the action take place over large spaces instead of single rooms or streets, Shrew went for more dramatic sweeping vistas and crowd scenes; Earnest was judiciously limited to the two London townhouses and one country house, deviating very little from the scenes as required by the script. Use of closeups was likewise more dramatic in Shrew, most notably with the recurring image of an eye peering through lattices. (It would have been nice to see a similarly deft hand put to recurring comic images.) Earnest used almost no tight closeups, and very few particularly dramatic angles; one irresistible exception is the scene of Jack giving Gwendolyn his country address, shot over the shoulder of Algernon, who is copying down the address himself with a wicked grin. For the most part, Earnest was tastefully understated in camera technique, allowing the audience to focus on the action and dialogue itself; the few obvious instances of technique were skilfully chosen to augment the comic impact of the scene.

The only point where Earnest becomes a little too heavy-handed with its use of the film medium to achieve comic effect are the two instances where the scene cuts away briefly ¾ first to Algernon en route to the country house, and then later to Aunt Augusta coming on a different train. This seems to be an attempt to build dramatic irony, but a rather clumsy one, particularly the first cutaway; if we in the audience have been paying attention, we already know that Algernon is coming (and can guess what he plans) when Cecily wishes out loud that her Uncle Jack would allow his unfortunate brother to visit sometime, and we can laugh at the irony without needing to be reminded of that fact. The dramatic irony of the second cutaway is somewhat more effective than the first, since we know that Aunt Augusta will do her grim best to spoil everything when she arrives. However, the original script allows the audience to be as shocked as the four lovers are when she enters, and this technique ruins the surprise. In addition, that particular cutaway's impact is blunted by the unnecessary length of time it takes ¾ a shorter glimpse of her in the train, with no dialogue, would have been much more effective.

Certain other choices made by the director were unclear to me. For instance, the breaking of the first scene into two smaller scenes, one at Jack's home and one at Algernon's, seems to serve very little real purpose other than to give Jack the chance to cast Algy's line about carelessness regarding invitations back into his face, which seems to be a rather small return (in comic terms) for such a contrivance. Of course, this scene-breaking also gives the opportunity to show the London street while Jack is on his way to Algernon's, but the outdoor scene itself takes time that could have been more effectively used elsewhere ¾ as in the few scenes where certain punchlines are inexplicably removed from the dialogue. Cecily complains that she doesn't like novels that end happily, without adding "They depress me so much" (act 2, p. 143); Gwendolyn cries "The suspense is terrible," but does not add "I hope it will last" (act 3, p. 186). And finally, while I can fully understand the director's reason for showing us the fateful handbag in Jack's room during the beginning of Act 2 (a scene not given in the text), I think the penultimate scene would have worked much better both dramatically and comically if the camera had remained downstairs with the others, rather than following Jack upstairs to watch him frantically retrieve the handbag. The noise of furniture being thrown about would allow the audience to imagine for themselves what must be happening upstairs, which is more dramatic than showing it directly. Likewise, watching the half-crazed Jack tearing apart his own room is not as funny as hearing the collective reactions of the group waiting for him downstairs.

Despite these points, Earnest is on the whole very well done. As in the original text, virtually all of the comedy is verbal, and even the director's added visual jokes (Jack's doubletake at the cigarette case, Algernon's marvelously mobile face that finds more ways to look wickedly delighted than humanly possible, Merriman looking amusedly from Gwendolyn to Cecily during their catfight, et cetera) tend to be on a cognitive rather than a physical level, "high" rather than "low" comedy, which is exactly as it should be. The best of these by far is the recurring moment of singing: We see Jack humming to himself in the bath, the first sight we have of him. Algernon's piano playing is changed to a similar wordless "rum-tum-tum" song (losing the pun on "piano/forte," but quite worth the loss for the eventual payoff). Finally, as the two gentlemen stroll into the house where Gwendolyn and Cecily are, in an attempt to display how nonchalant and at ease they are, the two begin singing together, falling into harmony much as two people walking together fall into step, and the overall comic effect is priceless.

Fortunately, the director of Earnest did not attempt to make this play into a serious dramatic comedy, which would have been a dreadful mistake; Earnest would not work as drama any better than Shrew worked as slapstick. It is, as the playwright originally had in mind, a trivial comedy ¾ and as such can only be "corrective" in terms of the audience, not the characters. Gwendolyn and Cecily and Algy and Jack (excuse me, Ernest) are not supposed to learn anything from this story; rather, the audience is meant to learn something about itself from watching them. The director clearly understood this, and accordingly adhered to the script and stage directions for the most part, allowing the skillful Wilde to direct his own play as he intended. Perhaps to highlight this very point, the director added the brief focus on the well-dressed couple in the audience at the opening of the play within the film; this is a story about the audience as much as about the characters.

To sum up: this film adhered quite closely to the script, and almost all changes made were in keeping with the spirit of the playwright's intent; kept the comedy in the realm of wordplay and other forms of high comedy; and allowed each character to remain delightfully in character, with no more or less depth than they were originally given. The Importance Of Being Earnest was as charming and refreshing in the movie version as onstage; altogether very well done.

The director of Shrew was attempting to provide what he felt the average American moviegoer would want ¾ lavish visual spectacles, belly laughs, chases and fights reminiscent of the Three Stooges, and Liz Taylor in a dazzling and varied wardrobe. The choice to depend upon physical rather than verbal comedy was probably made in order to sidestep the difficulty of understanding the complex Elizabethan language; a pratfall is universal, and will be understood where a soliloquy might not be. (This was a critical mistake on the part of the director -- as Kenneth Branagh has so ably demonstrated, Shakespeare can easily be presented so as to appeal to American audiences without sacrificing the language. His visual effects enhance and explain the words, rather than obscuring them with irrelevancies.)

The director of Earnest, on the other hand, was aiming his film at the average British moviegoer, with a quite different result. British audiences are expected to appreciate clever wordplay and witticisms even in the most "common" popular entertainment, as can be seen in modern British humor from Monty Python movies to the written works of British authors like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. This director therefore felt no need to talk down to his audience, or to rely on low comedy to make his movie accessible.

These two comedies, both potentially entertaining, diverged when translated into the film medium. One became a film positively insulting in its exclusive propensity towards low comedy, its complete disregard for character integrity and for the playwright's vision, and its implied low opinion of the target audience. The other made the transition from stage to screen smoothly, mostly by clinging to the original script and only including innovations to greater comic effect, and became a highly enjoyable and successful comedy. Behind these transformations are the respective directors, whose choices for good or ill made these movies what they are: something appealing, something appalling....