Extending the Filmic Canon

The Banquet and Maqbool

Authors

  • Mark Thornton Burnett Queen's University, Belfast

Abstract

Cluster: Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective

Edited by Alexa Huang

The Banquet (dir. Feng Xiaogang, 2006) deploys a filmic method that, despite assertions to the contrary, is deeply read both in playing conventions and in the textual debates of Shakespeare's work. No less powerfully suggested is the film's awareness of its status as the latest in a long line of Shakespearean cinematic realizations. The outlines of the drama and the key players, for instance, are invariably doubly rephrased. Arguably taking energy from its contemporary surroundings, Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2003), too, is conscious, at least in part, of functioning as a remake. Allusions to the titular protagonist inheriting "Bollywood" and the fact that the Lady Macbeth figure is a type of frustrated actress, make logistical sense within the parameters of a film that openly confesses to being inspired by Macbeth. Central to the film's effect are the ways in which the traditional exercises of fatherhood are elaborated as the primary means through which power is transferred. Elsewhere, musical interludes in which a public woman's voice plays out the male protagonist's inner compulsions demonstrate the extent to which Maqbool pushes at some of the play's gendered preoccupations.

Author Biography

Mark Thornton Burnett, Queen's University, Belfast

Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen's University, Belfast, Director of the Kenneth Branagh Archive and Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project, Filming and Performing Renaissance History (http://www.qub.ac.uk/renaissancehistory). He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), Constructing "Monsters" in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) and Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), the editor of The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe (London: Dent, 1999) and The Complete Poems of Christopher Marlowe (London: Everyman, 2000), and the co-editor of New Essays on "Hamlet" (New York: AMS Press, 1994), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

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Published

2009-05-01