Shakespeare’s Rome and Egypt and their People in Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Analysis https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10795654

Shakespeare’s Rome and Egypt and their People in Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Analysis

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The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165
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Adaptation Poetics: A Kaleidoscopic Study of Victorian Fiction in Films
Dr. Atiya Noor
Assistant Professor,
Maulana Azad Memorial College Jammu.
Article History: Submitted-17/01/2024, Revised-16/02/2024, Accepted-22/02/2024, Published-29/02/2024.
Abstract:
Advent of Cinema has made it possible to adapt Victorian novels to create films which
mesmerize and regale its audience. Literary texts provide raw material which has already been
read and has earned the respectability conferred by the gleaming reputation and popularity of
the authors. The decision of a filmmaker to choose a novel to adapt can depend on the novel’s
popularity, familiarity of the public with it, and moreover commercial success also plays a
prime role, along with the cinematic potential of a novel.
In today’s unquestionably fast world of technological progress where people struggle
for leisure time, there may have been many who would have enjoyed film adaptations of
classic Victorian novelists whose works are successfully adapted into films. Among others,
there are examples of remarkable Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens, Brontë sisters:
Emily, Charlotte, Anne and Thomas Hardy. The novels written by these writers were prolific
and voluminous and readers often find no time to read them but nonetheless, there is a desire
to know about the great works of these authors.
The film should remain faithful to the original work, conveying the same feeling,
atmosphere, plot and characterization even though scenes, characters and conflicts are changed
in an ideal scenario. To understand film adaptation it becomes imminent to analyze and
understand the way literary expression informs, extends, shapes and limits it. The most
stimulating question in film adaptation of Victorian novels is to understand, how close the
adapted material must resemble the chosen source. In reality, the exact reproduction of the
novel’s content is not possible.
Keywords: Film adaptation-Victorian Novels- Books- Novels- Films -Technology-
Intertextuality- Different versions- Different Mediums- Fidelity- Reader – Audience.
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Literature has always provided films with a variety of source material and Victorian
novel has the potential to reach a wider audience when its delicate and nuanced narrative is
transformed into a visual feast. This complicated process of transfer of the written narrative on
celluloid for an audience is known as film adaptation. Since the development of screenplays
from the beginning of cinema, film adaptation is one of the important features of cinema.
Interestingly, the advent of cinema is a very recent and remarkably, a short period compared
to over five hundred years of printing-press culture. Cinema has become a major conveyor of
the narratives of novel. John Harrington in Film And/As Literature explains, “while other art
forms have taken centuries to flourish the span of single lifetime has witnessed the birth and
maturity of film” ( ix).
Victorian novels have been portrayed successfully to create films with which to
mesmerize and regale its audience. Literary texts provide raw material which has already been
read and has earned the respectability conferred by the gleaming reputation and popularity of
the authors. The decision of a filmmaker to choose a novel to adapt can depend on the novel’s
popularity, familiarity of the public with it. Moreover, commercial viability also plays a prime
role, along with the cinematic potential of a novel. To understand film adaptation, it becomes
imminent to know the way literary expression informs, extends, shapes and limits it. The most
stimulating question in film adaptation is how close the adapted material must resemble from
the chosen source. In reality, the exact reproduction of the novel’s content is not possible.
In today’s unquestionably fast world of technological progress where people struggle
for leisure time, there may have been many who would have enjoyed film adaptations of
classic Victorian novelists whose works are successfully adapted into films. Among others,
there are examples of remarkable Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens, Brontë sisters:
Emily, Charlotte, Anne and Thomas Hardy. The novels written by these writers were prolific
and voluminous and readers sometimes find no time to read them but there is a desire to
know about the great works of these authors.
In an ideal scenario, film should remain faithful to the original work, conveying the
same feeling, atmosphere, plot and characterization even though scenes, characters and
conflicts are changed. Thus, Alexia L. Bowler and Jessica Cox write in Introduction to
Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisiting, Revising and Rewriting the Past, a collection of
essays,

Film adaptation in its broadest sense is a phenomenon that extends to
and permeates multiple arenas of contemporary life. There exists between
ostensibly distinct areas of society and cultural production an intertextual and
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metatextual dialogue, which continues to act as a process of renewal of creative
endeavors. What is relatively new in the adaptive practices, however,
is the active theorizing and engagement with the process. (1)
Walter Benjamin and neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School focused on the relationship
of cinema to ideology, theorizing the culture industry, and the impact that art forms based in
mechanical reproduction have on traditional conceptions of art and aesthetic experience.
Technological advancement has made it possible to view these classic works in a capsule form
through film adaptation. Film adaptations, therefore have created a niche market for audiences
who may sometimes watch the film and may not have read the novel due to time constraints.
Literary texts are successfully adapted to film and various novels from the Victorian
period, like Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839) and Great
Expectations (1861). Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
(1847), Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the
Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1892), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Film
adaptation theorizes the various contexts that form the basis of adaptation and has contributed
to this new and emerging area of interdisciplinary research on two distinct art forms novel and
film. These novels have been selected keeping in view their popularity as film adaptations,
especially keeping the filmmakers and the film adaptations success in mind.
Novels which are widely adapted, share the features suggested by Erica Sheen in the
book From Page To Screen: Adaptations of the Classic Novel, “take the question of fidelity as
their primary critical point of reference” (2). The most important perspective which reflects
here is that to what extent and level, Victorian film adaptations can create versions which are
true to their literary originals. As Laura Carroll puts it in the chapter she has co-authored in
Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation, adaptation is “a fundamentally binary textual
system, involving a book and a film pair standing in a simple and common-sensical relation of
an original and a copy” (227).
Consequently, it is assumed that there are common parameters for comparing stories
that are presented in these two genres as different as novels and films. Joy Gould Boyum
asserts in Double exposure: Fiction into Film that “the rhetoric of fiction is simply not the
rhetoric of film and it’s in finding analogous strategies whereby the one achieves the effects of
the other that the greatest challenge of adaptation lies” (81). Therefore, art of filmmaking
comes into existence where they invent methods and techniques to successfully
venture in this new territory of creativity. Moreover, novels as they are original, provide
standards for judging the relative success or failure of their adaptations.
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Recent publications on this subject reflect an increasing dissatisfaction with the
paradigms and methodologies in the field of film studies. The issue of Victorian film adaptation
because of the opposed ‘words’ and ‘images’ between them is nothing short of a complex
paradox. The perspective of the filmmakers and the original meaning of the novel makes this
topic a reason for stimulating and creative discussions. Similarly, J. Dudley Andrew in
Concepts in Film Theory, the most widely reprinted scholar of literary film adaptation, is one
of many to argue about “the absolutely different semiotic systems of film and language” (103).
Kamilla Elliott says in Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate only “a structurally constrained
model of analogous, already complete signs in their own lexicons that approximate literary
signs” can account for the otherwise unaccountable ability of film adaptations to provide
audio visual equivalents of novels (4).
Thus, it seems ‘Adaptation Poetics’ is integral to the process of filmmaking. Like all
postmodernist interpretations of literary texts that rely on intertextuality to supersede the
authorial voice, adaptation uses intertextuality to give meaning to the film versions of Victorian
novels. The story of novels comes to life virtually turning into a complex field of cultural
renewal due to multifarious interpretations by filmmakers using techniques, methods and
cinematic feats to reflect that on screen. Although it seems in this process, the writer loses the
authority in the process of filmmaking like Roland Barthes’s suggests in the essay “Death of
an Author” regarding the text, the film directors however retain verisimilitude, “realism”
being an aspect of the nineteenth century novels, thus somehow keeping the essence, the
unique stamp of the author in the finished product.
The area of film adaptation studies may not be a distinct theoretical school of criticism
but in adapting literary works of fiction to cinema, the intention of the author has been retained
by the filmmakers. Like Roland Barthes’s “Death of an Author,” Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory
gives a corollary statement of how film directors take over the role of an author in film
adaptations. It analyzes the novels reflecting its multiple expressions, its ability to give shape
to ideas, feelings and personal orientations of the filmmakers and these novels being the
repository of raw material for the rising number of auteur film directors. The relationship
between novels and film, and the differences between the ‘original’ text and the film
adaptation, making this a relevant and worthy area of research.
Essentially, adapting these novels into films involves two media, which have their
own different techniques, conventions and consciousness. Varied aspects of film production,
that is, camera work, cinematic codes and authorship has been the field of study for film critics.
Due to so many changes there is no specific ‘Poetics of Adaptation’. To understand this
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complex field further, films borrow from the dramatic convention, and Aristotle’s Poetics
provided the earliest poetics of drama. Novel is a genre that does not perform but narrates, so
adapting novels into film would require a poetics.
Aristotle’s Poetics held that the common feature of all art forms is imitation. Similarly,
the concept of catharsis speaks volumes about the effect films have on an audience. Aristotelian
dramatic elements are pioneering and magical in defining adaptation poetics which include
plot, characters, thoughts, diction, melody and spectacle. These dramatic elements are
important to understand that films not only offer the written and verbal aspect but also
‘theatrical performance,’ ‘music,’ ‘sound effects’ as well ‘moving photographic images
whereas the dependence of novels to words makes it a ‘single-track’ medium.
The conflicts and questions arising between novels and their film adaptations analyses
Victorian literature about adaptation on the fidelity question. Many differences are studied
between the two forms, the process of transfer of a Victorian novel into a film and the marketing
mechanics used by the filmmakers to make the film a commercially viable product, for the
viewers with the aim of tracing an ‘Adaptation Poetics’ in the study. The poetics of film
adaptation is concerning the matter of the novel, transfer meaning the process of filmmaking
and form as film meant for the audiences. These three terms are further broadened to understand
the subtleties of the process of film adaptation of Victorian fiction with the help of the different
methods and techniques employed by filmmakers to transform these novels into film form.

I

Literature has been considered as an artistic form of expression whereas films are
considered as a mass medium. Just as the writers tried in the Victorian age, to adopt the populist
approach of giving the public the novels they wanted, the same can be said of the these films
meant for all types of viewers. Part of gaining that respect is to see how film adaptations, when
adapted from beloved novels, are similar to these novels, and how the two forms are different.
After the era of silent films when sound system was introduced, Brian McFarlane in
Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation writes that “[m]ainstream cinema
has owed much of its popularity to representational tendencies it shares with the nineteenth-
century English novel” (8).These similarities arose and developed from early cinema, as Keith
Cohen writes in Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange, “more or less blatant
appropriation of the themes and content of the nineteenth- century bourgeois novel”( 4). Silent
films, then borrowed their stories, features, and conventions from realistic, bourgeois
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nineteenth-century English novel. According to Sergei Eisenstein, they were especially
indebted to the work of Charles Dickens, who “bore the same relation to [his readers] that the
film bears to the same strata in our time” ( Bloom 206). Though Dickens did not live to see the
advent of cinema, many of his novels received successful stage adaptations during his lifetime,
and many critics and filmmakers have remarked on the ‘cinematic’ qualities in Dickens’
narrative sensibility, descriptive power and penchant for abundant detail, most notably
filmmaker and theorist Eisenstein in his influential 1944 essay, “Dickens, Griffith and
the Film Today.”
Brontës sisters are a fascinating set of writers who grew up in poverty, reading widely
and writing novels rich in imagination. The stormy sisterhood published their novels under the
non de plumes as Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell and died in their thirties. As children,
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte made up their imaginary worlds, and as young women that
continued. It was in their apprenticeship as children blossoming them into such great writers.
Improving from childhood stories to novels, the sisters would work after their father had gone
to bed, reading and talking over their plans and projects. Along with their brother Branwell,
the girls began to immerse themselves in an insular fantasy world of imaginary heroes and
romances, writing down the stories in tiny script. As Charlotte’s friend and biographer
Elizabeth Gaskell puts it, “while doing so they would pace their parlour like restless animals”
(Orel 108).
Brontës published their novels under pseudonyms as young women , and then died in
their thirties from tuberculosis, influenza and typhus. Emily died in the year 1848 at the age
thirty, Anne died in 1849 at the age of twenty- nine with Charlotte left to walk in the parlor
alone. Brontës have been adapted extensively, more than other writers and every year new
adaptation comes up to highlight the popularity of these novels. Filmmakers have been drawn
to the Brontës almost from the beginning of filmmaking, as early as 1910. The magnetism of
the sisters’ rich and powerful imaginative literary lives has continued to fascinate readers in
the present day. The enduring attraction of film, and later television, productions of the Bronte
novels has significantly influenced perceptions of the sisters, and given many new
readings and interpretations of their works.
Thomas Hardy is an inspiration for film directors from the very inception of cinema.
The nature of Hardy’s text is amiable for film and television as he is known as a cinematic
writer. The novels of Hardy are regarded as cinematic in their scope and power, and they have
inspired some of the most interesting adaptations of fiction for the big screen. Hardy’s novels
are apt case studies to show how the novel has evolved and how the text can take new form
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when adapted for films. The films based on his novels give an insight on so many new levels,
interestingly Hardy lived to negotiate screen rights with film producers and to see his novels
put before the camera. Hardy often expressed puzzlement and diffidence over this new
medium, a “scientific toy,” as he once called it, but he grasped the potential of film to expand
his readership into new areas.
II
Victorian fiction is also known for its attempt to combine imagination and emotion
with the neo-classical ideal of the accessibility of art for everyone. Likewise, cinema is a mass
medium and film adaptations of the concerned Victorian fiction circulate literature to people
who might not have read such works. Victorian novelists were more concerned to meet the
tastes of a large middle-class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. This is also a
source of fascination and inspiration for filmmakers.
Regarding the cultural work that Victorian adaptations perform today, Dianne F. Sadoff
posits in Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen that “[h]eritage film morphs, travels, and
productively forces us to imagine ourselves in different but not unrelated historical dilemma
and difficulties as we seek to live within and survive our own millennial age of anxiety”
(xxii). Film adaptation of Victorian fiction has repeatedly been an inspiration for filmmakers.
The text is adapted and the novel is made relevant to new audiences.
Victorian literature and film adaptation has generated enduring interest to the cinematic
treatments of Victorian novels. So powerful is the attraction of this subject that Simone Murray
has complained about the predominance in adaptation studies of films based on the nineteenth-
century (Murray 10) .
Numberless commentators on adaptations have noted the similarity between two
touchstones of novelistic and cinematic mimesis. In his 1897 preface to The Nigger of
“Narcissus”, Joseph Conrad wrote, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of
the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel- it is, before all, to make you see!” (x).
Sixteen years later D.W. Griffith echoed Conrad, “The task I am trying to achieve is above all
to make you see.” Movies and novels, as commentators from George Bluestone to Brian
McFarlane have argued, share the primary charge of helping their audience envision
imaginary worlds (Lewis 119).
Tom Gunning in his essay “An Aesthetic of Astonishment”, proposed a very different
narrative of cinema’s origins, contending that many early films were based of “aesthetic of
astonishment” whose audience “does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but
remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfilment.” Gunning’s
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“cinema of attractions” which emphasizes the carnival appeal of powerful individual images
and sequences over sustained narrative, goes a long way toward explaining why, despite the
alleged influence of the nineteenth- century English novel on early film, there are hardly any
silent Victorian novel films (Shehperdson 78).

The forms and themes of Victorian novels certainly had a pronounced impact on early
cinema. After the aesthetic development of the dialogue-driven, synch sound feature merged
more closely with that of the bourgeois realism of the nineteenth century English novel. Even
here, however, important distinctions should be made among the several legacies that
nineteenth-century English novels left twentieth century cinema. As Kamilla Elliot puts it:
The Victorian novel looms monolithic: first, as the link pin between poetry
and painting and novel and film debates; second, as film’s most immediate
and loudly proclaimed parent; third, as a particularly problematic,
anachronistic locus of cinematic novel analogies; and fourth, as a body of
literature offering multiple adaptations of single novels. (7)
The history of adaptation studies since McFarlane wrote Novel to Film has
increasingly sustained assaults on these assumptions. Imelda Whelehan contends that films’
ability to beget their own literary offspring in the form of novelizations has “destabilized the
tendency to believe that the origin text is of primary importance” (3). Sarah Cardwell rejects
comparative page to screen analysis in favour of “a non-comparative, ‘generic’ approach”
whose primary context for analysis is the common features television adaptations of classic
novels share with one another (77). Ginette Vincendeau collects a series of essays and reviews
adopting just such a generic approach to the “museum aesthetic” of “heritage Cinema” whose
“concern’…is to depict the past, but by celebrating rather than investigating it” (xviii). Kamilia
Elliot, subjecting literalized and structural analogies between avowedly verbal novels and
visual films to rewardingly close critique, proposes “looking to rewardingly close critique,
proposes “looking glass analogies” as a superior alternative (209).
Robert Stam, citing the ubiquity and normality of adaptation, suggests that it was “less
an attempted resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing dialectical process”
(64). Linda Hutcheon, driven by a determination to broaden the field beyond novels and films
to the whole range of adaptation, focuses on “the politics of intertextuality” that
seek to explain how adaptations have been perceived and received “as adaptations” ( xiv).
Instead of seeking to establish once and for all the textual relations between particular films
and their Victorian sources in particular, the films’ success in using medium-specific devices
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to convey the same effects as the source’s verbal, lexical, and literary devices- they seek to
provoke, develop, extend, and resolve more general questions about adaptation,
intertextuality, and the continued fascination with the cultural capital that is offered by
nineteenth-century English literature and literary culture.
Other contributions question more sharply the continuing value of comparisons of
novels and films in the light of the criticism many adaptation scholars have recently levelled
against such studies. Ellen Moody considers a wide range of influences and concludes by
defending the primacy of the recognized author of eponymous source texts of films as the only
basis for a practical, feasible methodology of “close comparative reading” (Bloom and
Pollock 169). Christopher Palmer, by contrast, urges that in teaching adaptations, “the literary
texts are not [to be] treated simply as transparent preludes to the films” (Bloom and Pollock
226).
Whichever positions they take on the relations between adaptations and their
eponymous source texts, all critics agree that even if they offer limited frameworks for
everything adaptation studies might want to say, can provide focal points for more general
arguments by reframing Victorian fiction and Victorian culture. They remind one as well that
even the allegedly original Victorian classics have been framed- packaged and presented in
many ways, but never unframed- from their first appearances.
Instead of considering the adaptation of particular sources, Mary Sanders Pollock
focuses on the adaptation of particular techniques, such as shifting points of view, treating
them as transmedial phenomena rather than the properties of any single medium. In their
different ways, Laura Carroll and Pollock demonstrate that book to film analyses, though they
are poor masters for adaptation but make excellent servants if they are consciously chosen
and productively applied.
In addition to providing a fresh look at specific Victorian novels, critics suggest several
ways in which adaptation study can move scholars to reconsider, reconceptualise, and reorder
nineteenth-century studies. The organizational principle, which assimilates adaptation study to
literary history, persists in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo’s Literature and Film 2005.
The most obvious alternative, organizing a collection of adaptation case studies according to
the release dates of the adaptations, as Stam and Raengo do in A Companion to Literature and
Film 2004, substitutes cinema history for literary history. Reconsidering the fiction of the long
Victorian period produces a new canon shaped by adaptation, this exercises in canon revision
suggest that canons, whose very definition suggests eternal endurance, are always works in
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progress. The products of individuals and institutions that hope to project their tastes and
values not only forward onto their students but also backward onto previous generations. The
ultimate goal is not to present a new, improved, and definitive view of nineteenth century
English literature and literary culture but to remind one of the radical contingency of the
culture that is so often proposed. As Laura Caroll puts it, “to destabilize the tendency to see
either the novel or the film as fixed in its meanings, or as having a kind of documentary
authority (226 ).

Films are happier and more glamorous than novels and O’Brien and Borden derive four
principles of adaptation, “Simplify the plot, glamorize the characters, optimize the premise
and romanticize the ending” (O’Brien and Borden, 114-115). Joy Gould Boyum takes this
one step further, suggesting that what is important to remember is that “there is no single type
of correspondence between films and their literary sources’. Boyum writes that in assessing a
film adaptation it is not really that the book is compared with the film but rather interpretation
with interpretation:
[f]or just as we readers, so implicitly is the filmmaker, offering us through his
work, his perception, his vision, his particular insight into his source. An
adaptation is always, whatever else it may be an interpretation. And if this is
one way of understanding the nature of adaptation, and the relationship of any
given film to the book that inspired it, it’s also a way of understanding what
may bring such a film into being in the first place: the chance to offer an analysis
and an appreciation of one work of art through another (61-62).
Another group of critics does not believe that fidelity is the central aim of adaptation.
Erica Sheen argues persuasively that classic English novels cast as long a shadow over
academic writing on adaptation as they do over specific adaptations themselves because the
replacement of individual authors with filmmakers as the producers of socially powerful
discourse “effaces the presence of the intellectual in the production system”(7). As Sheen’s
analysis implies, however, it is not only individual authors but also the ideal figures of the
individual author and the intellectual that scholarly attention to adaptation valorises. Thus,
Victorian novelists and their novels have remained as pivotal for adaptation theorists as for
filmmakers.
Victorian novels have well-ordered stories of rich and varied characters set against a
believable social canvas having potential of film adaptation. Their prodigious length, density
of incident, accretion of detail, and psychological penetration all pose what one might call
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exemplary challenges to cinematic adaptation. The attempt to rescue the nineteenth century
novels that have engendered apparently more adventurous film adaptations requires to break
with the traditional practice of reading the novels as sources to which the films owe due
respect and instead treat both novels and films with equal respect.
Victorian novels and their film adaptations follow a code of Aristotelian dramatic
elements which are pioneering and magical in defining plot, characters, thoughts, diction,
melody and spectacle. These elements are applied in film translating into screenplay, actors,
dialogues, language, music and audience. These common features bind the novel and film
together translating the text from page to screen to please an audience literally and visually.
The film rides on the shoulders of many creative minds, beginning from the director, producer,
actors, cameraman and other technicians. It is a creative as well as a business venture, thus
making it a challenging task but also supposedly effacing the writer in the venture. In my
opinion the writer does not die but remains alive through the film.
Nevertheless, filmmaking provides an impetus to fiction, a deep engagement with the
creative thought process necessary for longevity of the work. It is a way to ensure an interesting
take in the other medium for readers who have already read the book. The complete visual
experience a film gives, makes the less realized portions of literature more concrete. The briefly
touched upon portions of a film can make viewers go to the novel to relish them in a more
contemplative manner. The novel’s ability to make one “see” something that is not there, and
the film’s ability to present the viewer with all the details he/she could not visualize gives the
reader/ viewer a dual benefit and ensures an activism imminent for future growth of the subject.

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