German idealistic thinking can be approached in many different ways, each of which has peculiar advantages and problems. According to the standard view, the German idealist movement is best looked at as a philosophical program that was developed in the wake of Kant's Critical philosophy with the intention of improving his transcendental idealism in various directions. The now-dominant version of this view has it that, starting with K. L. Reinhold, a whole generation of young German philosophers embarked on the project of arriving at new foundations for Kant's philosophy, of distinguishing what was taken to be the highly promising spirit of his philosophical conception from its rather poor literal expression by Kant himself, and of providing the missing premises for the conclusions of his theory. Although this project was approached from very different points of view by each of the main figures of that movement - J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel - there were some convictions that they shared.

The leading figures of the generation that came to philosophical maturity in the 1840s stressed, from the start, their sharp disagreements with the systematic idealism of their predecessors. As Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author Johannes de Silentio makes clear in Fear and Trembling, the one thing that he is not writing is “the System,” that is, any version of Hegelian idealism. Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx could have said the same. Their followers, to this day, understandably emphasize those aspects of their heroes' work that take them so far away from German Idealism that they can appear to be an attempt to “leave philosophy” altogether and to replace it with radical critique, revolutionary activism, and rigorous empirical science. In addition, all three thinkers agree on the charge that most of German Idealism, like much of modern philosophy in general, can be dismissed as little more than an alienating effort to carry out theology by other means. Their agreement on this point is all the more remarkable since it arose despite obvious and deep disagreements: Feuerbach and Marx came to bury all religion, whereas Kierkegaard aimed to rejuvenate it by calling for a return to Christian orthodoxy.

In Victorian poetry we see a proliferation of poetic forms, departing from eighteenth-century heroic couplets and neoclassical odes, and further developing the Romantic revival of ballads, sonnets, and blank verse into increasingly refined and rarefied metrical experiments. Alongside the English fashion in Italian sonnets, French stanzaic forms, Germanic accentual verse, and various kinds of dialect poetry - as well as a fascination with the literary recreation of songs, ballads, hymns, refrains, and other musical forms - there was a return to meters inspired by ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Victorian prosody - the study of meter - also became increasingly elaborate: in addition to counting the number of stresses or syllables per line, as in the tradition of English accentual-syllabic verse, prosodists tried to measure the length (or “quantity”) of syllables in English according to the tradition of classical quantitative verse. The publication of historical surveys and theoretical treatises on meter rose dramatically throughout the Victorian period, ranging from Edwin Guest's A History of English Rhythms (1838, revised 1882) to George Saintsbury's History of English Prosody (1906-10), and peaking mid-century with the New Prosody of Coventry Patmore and his contemporaries, and again at the end of the century, with the circulation of numerous polemical pamphlets and scholarly debates about meter.

Sir Laurence Olivier's 1955 film of Richard III centres on a single character and has, according to Anthony Davies in Filming Shakespeare's Plays, more links with his Hamlet than with his Henry V. It is, says Davies, a 'psychological study developed along the lines of attitudes to and conceptions of power'. The film is unabashedly theatrical, with the kind of stylised sets that Peter Holland labels 'fake medievalism'. As Davies shows, however, the play becomes cinema. 'The primary articulation of Olivier's Richard III is essentially filmic.' Richard III, writes Jack Jorgens, is 'not really a history play'. Olivier depicts a 'renaissance wolf among medieval sheep . . . Richard's opponents [in the film] are weak and stupid, but they do not seem as evil as they do in Shakespeare'. Indeed, his victims tend to yield to him without resistance. Clarence does, of course, not reading his own vivid treachery as a family trait that inheres in his brother. Hastings does, ignoring Stanley's dream and his own stumbling horse. But Lady Anne, we notice, has taken off her wedding ring before her second meeting with Richard. It is as if she is waiting for him to ask 'Is not the causer of the timeless deaths . . . As blameful as the executioner?' in the second confrontation that Olivier crafts from the script.

Olivier notoriously includes some of Cibber’s lines (‘Somuch for Buckingham’ and ‘Richard is himself again’), some of Garrick’s structural improvements and segments of Richard’s speeches from 3 Henry IV (‘Clarence beware.Thou keep’st me from the light; / But I will sort a pitchy day for thee’: 5.7.85–6) and parts of the long speech beginning at 3.2.124. Olivier’s choice is shrewd here, because that speech marks the ‘invention of Richard of Gloucester’ and his ‘differentiation from the comparatively colorless orators and warriors who populate the Henry VI plays’.

Reginald Scot's 1584 treatise The Discovery of Witchcraft has a section entitled 'To cut off one's head, and lay it in a platter, etc, which the jugglers call the decollation of John the Baptist'. Scot explains how the Elizabethan playhouses worked this particular conjuring trick by means of a stage-device that looked like a pillory, and which showed one actor's head as if it belonged to another body. Other contemporary documents describe many similar illusions, which seem to have been common on the stage as well as on street-corners. Opinion was divided about their value: Ben Jonson despised their vulgarity in the Induction to Bartholemew Fair, some denounced them as witchcraft, others felt that 'if these things be done for recreation and mirth, and not to the hurt of our neighbour, nor to the profaning and abusing of God's holy name, then sure they are neither impious nor altogether unlawful, though herein or hereby a natural thing be made to seem supernatural'. It would be a mistake therefore to assume that members of Shakespeare's audience automatically suspected that such 'jugglers' were in league with the devil, even though several contemporary plays, from Doctor Faustus to Friar Bacon to Volpone exploit that idea - for fear, for laughs, for satire. The basic theatricality of Shakespeare's plays (disbelief only partially suspended) means there is room for lots of stage-tricks in the midst of the ordinary pretences of his theatre (costumes, stage-voices, boys as women). Both depend on illusion, but there is also a complex relationship, often a necessary conflict, between the representation of the mundane and the marvellous.

We all object to stereotypes. They are oversimplified preconceptions, involving those who trade in them in lazy thinking and prejudice. They don't derive from direct experience. They are subject to fashion. And they tend to come into conflict with one another. But however objectionable they may be, on intellectual or moral grounds, we can't avoid them in our own, as well as other people's, thinking.

When, in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Hamlet (1996), the Gravedigger (Billy Crystal) remarks that in England the men are as mad as Hamlet, we laugh. Not exactly uproariously, but in the way, no doubt, that the line has raised a laugh for four hundred years. We laugh at the complexity of the dramatic irony in the situation – the Gravedigger’s subject is his Prince, he is his Prince’s subject, and yet here he is literally addressing his Prince on the subject. However, we also laugh at the English playwright giving the Danish character a stereotypical characterisation of the English. And if we’re English we laugh, slightly awkwardly, at the joke at our expense (not sure whether or not we recognise ourselves in it, not sure whether we’re particularly proud of our great English playwright’s laboured handling of it).

The romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love (1998) wittily puts the dramatist into the world of show business. Shakespeare's relationship with the theatre manager, Henslowe - and through him with 'the money' - is the occasion for a multitude of jokes referring to the entertainment industry of late sixteenth-century London in terms of its equivalent four hundred years later. In one moment of crisis Henslowe is even on the point of giving birth to a great cliché. 'The show must . . .' he starts, and Shakespeare completes the phrase by urging him impatiently to 'Go on.' The moment passes, unnoticed by either of them. The tension between the artist and the marketplace has always been a good source of humour in drama and fiction and on film, and the story is usually told in terms of the crassness of the producers and the crushed idealism of the 'creative' department. This is true to the experience of many artists, not least those writers and directors who worked in Hollywood at the height of the studios' powers. Writers and directors have often given accounts of their dealings with the 'front office' in which the latter's functionaries figure as craven, sentimental and reactionary, a characterisation many in the industry would of course dispute.

On a less personal and anecdotal level, analysts of culture are reluctant to allow that commercial films can be effectively radical. In his study of the cultural politics of Shakespearean interpretation, Big-Time Shakespeare (1996), Michael Bristol ruefully observes that ‘the cultural authority of corporate Shakespeare has nothing to do with ideas of any description’. Perhaps one might argue that if ‘ideas’ are defined less restrictively, the tension between ‘Shakespeare’, ideas and big business has yielded an engaging variety of cinematic results

“A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community,” announced Thomas Love Peacock in his satirically anti-Romantic essay “The Four Ages of Poetry” (1820), an essay whose vocabulary anticipates Matthew Arnold in the 1860s but which in fact takes a position quite antithetical to that of the later apostle of Culture and Hellenism. “He lives in the days that are past,” writes Peacock. “The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward” (21-22). Mischievously appropriating the standard historicist idea of the four ages that originally derives from the Greek poet Hesiod (8th century BC) who charts the decline of a golden age in Works and Days. Peacock derisively consigns modern poetry to the age of brass. He claims that the poets of his own time “wallow . . . in the rubbish of departed ignorance,” parasitically weaving “disjointed relics of tradition and fragments of second hand observation” into “a modern-antique compound of frippery and barbarism, in which the puling sentimentality of the present time is grafted on the misrepresented ruggedness of the past into a heterogeneous congeries of unamalgamating manners” (19-20). Peacock exhorts the modern reader to eschew such “artificial reconstructions of a few morbid ascetics in unpoetical times” (18) in favor of the genuine item, and thus “that egregious confraternity of rhymesters, known by the name of the Lake Poets” (18) is peremptorily dismissed.

Ask the man on the street what comes to mind when you mention 'Shakespeare', and the chances are that he will reply, 'to be, or not to be'. We have come to associate Shakespeare with tragedy, especially with Hamlet, and in fact the first century of Shakespeare on film began with Hamlet, in the form of a five-minute film directed by Maurice Clément and shown at the Paris Exhibition in 1900. It starred Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet and Pierre Magnier as Laertes. The predominance of the tragedies on screen until 1990 is confirmed by Kenneth Rothwell's and Annabelle Melzer's definitive filmography and videography that lists 184 entries for Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, i.e. 27 per cent of the total entries, even though they comprise only 8 percent of Shakespeare's work. Not surprisingly the film adaptations of the tragedies have received the most attention from (predominantly male) film critics as well. How and why Shakespearean tragedy on film has been able to transcend the temporal, national, ideological and cultural boundaries of Elizabethan England, even without Shakespeare's language, will be the question I am going to pursue.

‘Who’s there?’: the question of Fortinbras

Hamlet opens with a question, ‘Who’s there?’ and by the the time the play has ended, more questions have been raised than answered. The opening question also points to the end of the play when Fortinbras enters to clear the stage of carnage and assume the throne as Hamlet’s successor. It suggests that there is a circularity in the play and that Fortinbras may have been more important to Shakespeare than he has been to some directors.

Cinema is a 'looking' medium that writes its texts in visual language, and cinema has always been interested in looking at women. My account of Shakespeare's women on film wants to signal this interest from the beginning by remembering Bogart's 'Here's lookin' at you kid' in Casablanca, not just because that line, which cues the film's repeated instances of lingering focus on Bergman's face, defines a whole genre of cinematic looking, but also because it has achieved epigrammatic status independent of the film. It's become a slogan for much wider cultural habits that may have originated in films like Casablanca but now circulate in culture at large, reproducing cinema's looking practices in real life. The movies, in short, have taught us how to look at each other. To see how cinema has looked at Shakespeare's women, I want to begin with an instance of subversive looking: a wink, the one Mary Pickford's Kate aims sideways out of the frame at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, caught, in the next shot, by her sullen sister Bianca, whom it instantly transforms into a smiling conspirator. That wink rewrites Shakespeare's ending. But more importantly, it inserts into this Shrew a way of looking that is going to signify for the future of Shakespeare's women on film.

In 1911 the British trade press welcomed the Danish silent film Desdemona, where a jealous modern actor murders his wife on-stage during a performance of Othello. The producers were congratulated for understanding the public, for providing not 'unadulterated Shakespeare' but 'a good modern play with a plot not too deep but just deep enough for mental exercise without effort, while interest and excitement are sustained throughout'. There were 'countless hordes to whom the Bard's plays do not appeal in the remotest degree', but making a film 'so to speak, around the tragedy of Othello' should suit and satisfy and perhaps improve this mass audience. There were many such modernisations and adaptations in the silent era - Asta Nielsen's cross-dressed Hamlet, perhaps the greatest silent Shakespeare film, plays fast and loose with the original - and when in the late 1930s Warner Brothers' A Midsummer Night's Dream, MGM's Romeo and Juliet and in England Twentieth Century Fox's As You Like It were all critical and commercial failures and the studios abruptly lost faith in the plays' boxoffice potential, screen Shakespeare did not simply disappear. Just as 'Shakespeare' permeates our culture iconographically from cheque cards to cigars, so in mainstream film culture the plays have functioned as myths and sources; they materialise repeatedly and often unnoticed on cinema screens through allusions and variations, remakes, adaptations and parodies. In this broader, culturally important, sense 'Shakespearean film' is not only populated by Olivier, Welles, Branagh and company - Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Sartre and James T. Kirk are also there, alongside Cole Porter, Katherine Hepburn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Brooks and Sid James. Here we can only point to a vast terrain of cinematic appropriation, and suggest some historical implications of 'free' Shakespearean film.

The release of Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V in 1989 sparked a revival of creative and commercial interest in Shakespeare as a source for films, which had been dormant since the box-office failure of Roman Polanski's Macbeth in 1971. The surprising critical and financial success of Branagh's Henry V has proved to be as influential in the history of Shakespeare on film as was the equally unanticipated success almost fifty years earlier of Laurence Olivier's film of the play released in 1944. Olivier's Henry V led to a steady stream of international Shakespeare films over the next two decades by such directors as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Grigori Kozintsev, Franco Zeffirelli and Peter Brook.

Branagh’s 1989 film helped to create the most intense explosion of English-language Shakespeare films in the century. The 1990s saw the release of ten major Shakespeare films as well as several interesting Shakespearean offshoots, including Branagh’s own In the Bleak Midwinter. Branagh has now surpassed Olivier, Welles and Zeffirelli, to become the only director to have produced four Shakespeare films, though an examination of those films will reveal that Branagh has moulded his own cinematic style from elements present in the work of his distinguished predecessors.

Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Orson Welles is an isolated figure, driven by his unrelenting passion: 'this heart within me burns'. After the precocious brilliance of Citizen Kane at the age of twenty-five, some critics have regarded his journey through the world as one of decline punctuated by failure. The compulsive nature of his vision has proved disconcerting and he has gathered an unseemly gaggle of detractors. The cinema industry with its priorities so firmly asserted by Hollywood's premium upon financial success has tended to regard him as something of a wild and unpredictable grey-beard loon. Whilst there have been some critics who have sensitively praised Welles as the supreme auteur for his success in combining the roles of screenwriter, actor and director, they are possibly outnumbered by those who have an insatiable enthusiasm for fusing life and art. All too frequently the characters of Welles and Falstaff are yoked: 'In dramatising the simultaneous betrayal and self destruction of Falstaff, one can see Welles exploring a career of squandered talent and rejection.' Similarly, a jeering obsession with his weight was accompanied by accusations of sloth and contempt for his appearance in commercials. His self-exile from America may have been driven as much by pragmatism as pique, but the evidence that he was appreciated so much more in Europe, as 'a wise madman, a solitude surrounded by humanity', than at home, does contribute to the sense of his being a prophet without honour in his own land.