Even when adapting Shakespeare, there’s room for a little creative liberty
One of my favorite running jokes from A.V. Club commenters is the bit where someone selectively edits a sentence, a paragraph, or even an entire review in order to fashion a ludicrous blurb. (Recent example: “[A]t its heart, The Martian is an unapologetically stirring celebration of…Matt Damon…going down…on…Jessica Chastain.” —Mike D’Angelo, The A.V. Club.) Critics actually do sometimes see their “own words” abused in ads, albeit not quite that dramatically, and maybe that’s a good thing. If nothing else, it serves as a useful reminder that any film adaptation, no matter how ostensibly faithful, will inevitably be transformed by whoever’s adapting it. This can happen in countless ways, from an actor’s offbeat delivery of a line to an editor’s subtle emphasis on a particular character or detail. But sometimes it’s as basic as which dialogue from the source material gets spoken in the movie and which doesn’t. A writer—and especially a writer-director, able to strengthen ideas visually on set—can easily reconceive a speech or scene without rewriting a single word. Even if the original author was William Shakespeare.
What brought this to mind was my review last week of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, which includes (to its detriment, in my opinion) some passages from Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, rendered in modern English. Thinking about that element inspired me to re-watch some of my favorite scenes from Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 adaptation of Henry V, which I hadn’t seen in quite some time. I was particularly struck by the “three traitors” scene (Act 2, Scene 2), and wound up consulting the play in order to see whether Branagh—who wrote the script, and would later helm a four-hour Hamlet adaptation that uses the “entire text” (to the extent that such a thing exists)—had reshaped it in any way. As it turns out, he had, in a very specific direction that had all but completely escaped me on previous viewings. Shakespeare may well have intended to create a similar impression, but Branagh took deliberate steps to strengthen it, both in choosing which lines to cut and in his staging of the action. The result isn’t as radical as, say, setting Richard III in an imaginary fascist 1930s England, but a few small trims make a significant difference.
As an actor, Branagh is having an obscene amount of fun here. The scene has Henry spend a few minutes feigning camaraderie with Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey before dropping the bomb that he’s aware of their treason, and Branagh really cranks up the smiling sadism, over-enunciating certain words (“capital crimes”) and putting a lightly sarcastic spin on others (“their dear care and tender preservation of our person”). Once the mask drops, he’s fury incarnate, to the point where Henry visibly almost loses it when responding to their plea for mercy. Branagh had previously played the role onstage and knew exactly what he wanted to do with it; his performance throughout the film has the dynamic range of a Pixies or Nirvana song, alternating between soft and loud. (My favorite moment in this scene is his voice seeming to drop a full octave for the barked order, “Bear them hence.”) He received Oscar nominations that year for Best Actor (losing to fellow Brit Daniel Day-Lewis) and Best Director; given that he wasn’t even 30 at the time, it’s easy to see why he was regarded as the heir to Laurence Olivier, though that hasn’t quite panned out.
What’s really fascinating, though, is what Branagh opted to do behind the camera. While there are three traitors, one of them, Scroop (Stephen Simms), gets singled out as especially loathsome even before Henry appears on the scene. Exeter (Brian Blessed), discussing the situation with Bedford and Westmoreland (by way of some rather clunky exposition, frankly), expresses disgust that “the man that was his bedfellow” could have sold out his king. “Bedfellow” bounced off my ear back in ’89, but this time I did some research and learned that it’s an open question among scholars whether that word—which Shakespeare took from his own source for Henry V, Raphael Holinshed—is meant to suggest that Henry and Scroop had been lovers. Certainly, they were extremely close once… but that close? Adult men sharing a bed didn’t necessarily imply sex in Elizabethan England, and Shakespeare’s famous phrase “strange bedfellows,” coined for The Tempest, has no sexual undertone whatsoever. It’s not just possible but likely that nothing more than a very close friendship was intended. That would be betrayal enough.