and increasingly immobilized expression dominate the scene, as if daring us to see him as he is, while we remember him as he was. Warren Beatty is not so revealing. He is still ageless, unwrinkled deep in time, at least insofar as the shadow of a Dick Tracy fedora or the soft focus of a romantic remake will allow him to be. No wonder, then, that when Beatty remakes Antony and Cleopatra it is as an elegy not to Cleopatra, but to himself.
NOTES
1For Western history and literature's revisions of Cleopatra, see Hughes-Hallett (1990).
2Shakespeare 1954:3.13.116-17; Toback 1991:83. Both Antony and Cleopatra and Toback's Bugsy scripts are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
3I borrow some material from my dissertation in this paragraph (Eggert 1991).
4However, Butler's sequel to Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter, repudiates the suggestion that gendering is analogous to a theatrical actor's assumption of persona (1993:7).
5Virginia's last line in this conversation does not appear in Toback's published script.
REFERENCES
Andrew, Dudley. 1993. “History and Timelessness in Films and Theory.” Meanings in Texts and Actions: Questioning Paul Ricoeur. Ed. David E. Klemm and William Schweiker. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 115-32.
Ball, Robert Hamilton. 1968. Shakespeare and Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History. New York: Theatre Arts.
Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
--1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge.
Charnes, Linda. 1993. “Spies and Whispers: Exceeding Reputation in Antony and Cleopatra.” Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 103-47.
Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen . Signs 1:875-99.
--1986. “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 63-132.
Cohan, Steven. 1993. “Masquerading as the American Male in the Fifties: Picnic, William Holden and the Spectacle of Masculinity in Hollywood Film.” Male Trouble. Ed. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 203-32.
DeCordova, Richard. 1991. “The Emergence of the Star System in America.” Stardom: Industry of Desire. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: Routledge. 17-29.
Doane, Mary Anne. 1991. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Dyer, Richard. 1979. Stars. London: British Film Institute.
Eggert, Katherine. 1991. “Ravishment and Remembrance: Responses to Female Authority in Spenser and Shakespeare.” Diss. University of California, Berkeley.
Essoe, Gabe, and Raymond Lee. 1970. De Mille: The Man and His Pictures. South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes.
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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video.
Contributors: Lynda E. Boose - Editor, Richard Burt - Editor.
Publisher: Routledge.
Place of publication: London.
Publication year: 1997.
Page number: 213.
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