Book Review: Shakespeare in Hollywood

Robert F. Willson Jr.’s Shakespeare in Hollywood, 1929-1956 is a historical study of several of Shakespeare’s major works and the films which were inspired by them. The book covers productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar. It also discusses several other Shakespearean films, mostly films such as To Be or Not to Be, and A Double Life that were extremely loose adaptations of Shakespeare, often bearing no obvious resemblance to the original whatsoever except for some ambiguous Shakespearean themes. 

In the introduction to the book, Willson discusses the perception of Louis B. Mayer, the longtime head of Metro Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, and how he believed that a Shakespeare film would essentially be a failure at the box office mainly due to lack of interest among the mainstream film going public. However, certain filmmakers had a desire to prove their artistic ability through less commercialized films, and Willson’s thesis argues that studios then made these movies to cement their images as purveyors of the artistic rather than just a studio churning out films which were guaranteed successes. Also, he attempts to establish that certain aspects of these films came to characterize Hollywood cinema as a whole. For example, the idea of adaptations of novels into film that was obviously being done for these Shakespearean films is still a commonplace practice in filmmaking today.