ABSTRACT
Although tongue-in cheek, John McTieman’s The Last Action Hero (1993) raises questions about the teaching of Shakespeare and/or Shakespeare on screen and the gap between Shakespeare in the ‘academy’ (symbolized by the actress Joan Plowright, wife of Laurence Olivier, who plays the teacher) and Shakespeare’s Hollywood audience (represented by the 11-year-old boy pupil), a gap introduced by Richard Burt as between Shakespeare films and Shakespeare scholarship. As Burt notes, ‘mass culture narratives rely on dated scholarship: they view the writings as timeless monuments, as literary texts in which Shakespeare was working toward a final draft, rather than as thriving, continuing sites of cultural production and revision’.1 In this chapter, I want to explore the relationship between the perception of Shakespeare in academia and in Hollywood, looking at Michael Almereyda’s adaptation of Hamlet (2000) - on one level, another Last Action Hero - and which also relies on what Richard Burt identifies as ‘dated scholarship’, scholarship which functions essentially to revere what has come to be known as Shakespeare’s ‘timelessness’. I suggest that this blend of new and old (the teenpic paradoxically combined with old-fashioned bardolatry), in addition to the metropolitan setting of the movie, turns Shakespeare’s tragedy into something entirely different: a modem city comedy.
