Popular Culture Review Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 2015 | Page 46

Some critics charge that popular culture’s interest in Shakespeare in the 1990s was interest in a Shakespeare who had been “dumbed down” for popular audiences (Thompson 1053). Critic Richard Burt states of the film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays that generally “mass culture narratives rely on dated scholarship: they view the writings as timeless monuments, as literary texts in which Shakespeare was working toward a final draft rather than thriving, continual sites of cultural production and revision" (Burt 215). Such an understanding of the texts would see changes made for a film adaptation, such as the modernization in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, as directorial alteration of a timeless text rather than as a text being formed through a process of cultural interpretation. As such, the films would certainly operate under assumptions contrary to much of recent Shakespeare theory, especially postcolonial, queer, feminist, and presentist readings of the plays that are more inclined to embrace the ways that culture changes the texts by interacting with them. Is this the same as saying that these films reflect a “dumbed down" Shakespeare that is free from the influence of modern critical scholarship? The most recent film adaptation of The Tempest, Julie Taymor’s 2010 film starring Helen Mirren as Prospera, can only be said to reflect the slightest hint of postcolonial interpretations of the play. Certainly, Mirren’s Prospers is no ruthless or unsympathetic master, and Caliban himself hardly garners sympathy by hurling insults at an older woman. Whatever else might be said about the film, it certainly does not reflect a postcolonial reading of the play. Still, one would hesitate before calling Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest “dumbed down.” In fact, for such a production as Taymor’s The Tempest to be made for a popular audience, while not reflecting the latest scholarship but still being very smartly produced and played, speaks toward the possibility of popular culture ascribing meaning to Shakespeare’s texts quite apart from historical context, authorial intent, or even Will’s ‘esthetic’ considerations and also apart from the latest scholarly research. Taymor herself states that, while “obvious themes of colonialization and usurpation . .. clearly were part of Shakespeare’s worldview,” she hoped to “go beyond sociopolitical commentary achieved through a casting choice” in her own production of The Tempest (480). Djimon Hounsou, the actor whom Taymor cast as Caliban, argues that his character is definitely no mere brutish savage, but for Hounsou, “Caliban is all about being closely connected to nature," rather than being an enslaved postcolonial subject (Wilkins). 42