Hauntings in High Places How Hamlet Haunts Vertigo

Abstract

In Reading Shakespeare in the Movies: Non-Adaptations and their Meaning, Eric Mallin outlines a critical method for exploring Shakespearean analogues and meanings in films that are not adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Mallin defines a nonadaptation as “like a traditional form of cinematic production in that it summons a relationship between (in this case) a Shakespeare play and a movie that can be read through or in that play. But such a film lacks the discursive or extra-textual features of the adaptation: a known, implied, or readily deduced derivation from a prior text.”¹ This approach views non-adaptations as films in dialogue with Shakespeare’s work: the non-adaptational lens aims to highlight how two works with little to no direct relation “might have rewarding samenesses, and in those we might find something true and new about each text.”² The non-adaptation framework allows for creative critical exercise through which the similarities and differences between a Shakespeare play and a given film open new insights about both works while bypassing the oft-debated constraints associated with adaptation theory.³ To explore the Shakespearean non-adaptation is not to capture, in relation to the Shakespearean text, what the film is, but to re-contextualize and reexamine what it might mean.