Reshaping Shakespeare

Dmitri Shostakovich crowned an extensive film-composing career with his scores for Gamlet (Hamlet, 1964) and Korol’ Lir (King Lear, 1971) which were directed by his long-time collaborator Grigori Kozintsev and based on Boris Pasternak’s free translations. These films are regarded internationally as masterpieces in the Shakespeare filmic canon. Kozintsev drastically cut and re-ordered Pasternak’s translations, re-wrote sections, added many narrative elaborations, and—particularly in Hamlet—made use of dramatic mimes in which gestures expressed the essence of Shakespeare’s text without having the lines spoken. Drawing upon the most up-to-date publications of Shostakovich’s scores and correspondence between director and composer, this chapter demonstrates how Shostakovich’s music was vital to Kozintsev’s radical reshaping of Shakespeare’s texts, highlighting the occasions when the director requested that the music should reinforce and even replace entire sections. The resultant films merge Shostakovich’s often brutal but essentially humanist music with the timeless and universal themes in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Though arguably devoid of overt ideology, they are nonetheless deliberately provocative. Decades after their releases, these two magnificent Shakespeare adaptations can still provoke audiences to make their own associations and interpretations, to reflect on the current corrupt governments and senseless wars in which ordinary people are suffering because of the political machinations of their leaders.