Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Editor's note
- 1 Shakespeare and politics: an introduction
- 2 Shakespeare and politics
- 3 Henry VIII and the deconstruction of history
- 4 Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus
- 5 Richard II and the realities of power
- 6 Plutarch, insurrection, and dearth in Coriolanus
- 7 Some versions of coup d'état, rebellion, and revolution
- 8 Language, politics, and poverty in Shakespearian drama
- 9 ‘Demystifying the mystery of state’: King Lear and the world upside down
- 10 Venetian culture and the politics of Othello
- 11 The Bard and Ireland: Shakespeare's Protestantism as politics in disguise
- 12 Henry V as working-house of ideology
- 13 ‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the politics of theatrical representation
- 14 Take me to your Leda
- 15 Macbeth on film: politics
- 16 William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: everything's nice in America?
- Index
13 - ‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the politics of theatrical representation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Editor's note
- 1 Shakespeare and politics: an introduction
- 2 Shakespeare and politics
- 3 Henry VIII and the deconstruction of history
- 4 Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus
- 5 Richard II and the realities of power
- 6 Plutarch, insurrection, and dearth in Coriolanus
- 7 Some versions of coup d'état, rebellion, and revolution
- 8 Language, politics, and poverty in Shakespearian drama
- 9 ‘Demystifying the mystery of state’: King Lear and the world upside down
- 10 Venetian culture and the politics of Othello
- 11 The Bard and Ireland: Shakespeare's Protestantism as politics in disguise
- 12 Henry V as working-house of ideology
- 13 ‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the politics of theatrical representation
- 14 Take me to your Leda
- 15 Macbeth on film: politics
- 16 William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: everything's nice in America?
- Index
Summary
In David Zucker's 1988 film of The Naked Gun, a hapless Los Angeles Chief of Police, Lieutenant Frank Drebin, is warned by his relatively pacifist Mayoress employer to curb his propensity for violence. Drebin, himself an exaggerated post-modernist collocation of easily recognizable film texts, counters with a policy statement of his own sufficient to rival any pronouncement of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry:
Yes, well when I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards. That's my policy.
The response of his outraged employer is the embarrassed revelation that: ‘That was a Shakespeare in the park production of Julius Caesar you moron. You killed five actors: good ones.’ The choice of the assassination scene from Julius Caesar to illustrate the violence necessary to redress an alleged crime echoes parodically one of two familiar critical readings of this Shakespearian text. In Zucker's film the comic extolling of Caesarism through the wholly inept efficiency of a law enforcement officer unaware of his own representational status and also, at the same time, unable to distinguish other forms of representation, is reinforced by the reactionary nature of his task: the protection of a visiting English queen against the threat of assassination. The latter, ironically republican critical perspective is exemplified in Alex Cox's film Walker (1988) which utilizes a scene from Julius Caesar to explore, in the thinly veiled allegorical setting of nineteenth-century Nicaragua, the ironies and contradictions inherent in an imperialist project.
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- Shakespeare and Politics , pp. 206 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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