The Merchant of Venice (2004)

Did it really take 77 years for someone to make a talking picture out of The Merchant of Venice? There were about six made during the silent era, which I find oddly charming given that Shakespeare’s strength is the words his characters speak. Yet for all its popularity in the teens and twenties of the 20th century, it took until 2004 for someone to actually make Merchant as a talkie. This feels wrong. This feels perverse. No matter - at least a talking Merchant finally arrived, and at 138 minutes he talked quite a lot.

The Merchant of Venice is an excellent film, beautifully staged and well acted. Director Michael Radford treads a narrow and treacherous line here: the play is widely recognised as one that is, if not actively anti-Semetic, then certainly heavily informed by the anti-Semetic culture that produced its author. A lot has changed between 1596 and 2004. A lot of people have died. A lot have been persecuted. Most of us (but sadly not nearly enough of us) now know better.

Thankfully Radford has elected to meet the play half-way: he sets it in 1596, the year that Shakespeare likely wrote it, and he brings a self-aware 21st century sensibility to the now-objectionable behaviours of the 16th.

Othello (1995)

I remember Oliver Parker's Othello being a slightly controversial film when it was originally released. It was an adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tragedy Of Othello, The Moor Of Venice that dared to gut roughly two-thirds of Shakespeare's dialogue from the text. Such radicalism isn't easily tolerated by the Shakespearean elite, and Parker's film stumbled beneath an earthshaking wave of criticism. Film critics, rather than literary critics, were a little more forgiving, but this movie still got pretty harshly condemned as a dumbed-down, populist re-telling of the classic tragedy.

They were wrong. Othello succeeds where many other Shakespearean adaptations fail by realising that what works in the theatre in the 16th century does not necessarily work in the cinema 400 years later. It uses Shakespeare's text economically, ensuring that while being a faithful version of the play it is also a thrilling motion picture in its own right.