Blackwell Reference Online

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Near the beginning of Looking for Richard (1996), Al Pacino prepares to deliver the famous first speech from Shakespeare's Richard III. Sporting an irreverent baseball cap, the actor/director walks onto an ornate, mock-Elizabethan indoor stage. The camera cuts to show where the audience would be and there is only one member, a man whose face and dress resemble the Chandos Shakespeare portrait. “Shakespeare” disparagingly shakes his head, at which point Pacino sighs, shrugs, and walks off the stage without uttering a word of the play. In this virtually silent scene, Pacino wittily confronts what any Shakespearean film actor or director is up against: the pressure of expectational texts. Coined by Barbara Hodgdon, the phrase refers to the preconceptions about what “should” be done or what Shakespeare intended, which people bring to any performance of -Shakespeare's work (Hodgdon 1983: 143).A later sequence in Looking for Richard shows Pacino and his friend, Frederic Kimball, visiting Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. They enter the birthplace with the zeal of missionaries, wistfully expecting some kind of epiphany. However, their reverent entrance is interrupted by firemen who burst in unceremoniously, alerted to a false alarm. Pacino and Kimball's attempt to commune with some Shakespearean spirit instead emphasizes the impossibility of immediate contact with the author ... log in or subscribe to read full text