Shakespeare's grave: the British fiction of Hollywood - William Shakespeare - Critical Essay

All sorts of English oddities turn up in Hollywood.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Old Reliable (51)

I have a favorite quote about L.A., by William Shakespeare. He said: "This other Eden, demi-Paradise,/This precious stone set in the silver sea,/This earth, this realm, this-Los Angeles."

L.A. Story

Is Shakespeare buried in Hollywood? Steve Martin's 1991 film L.A. Story asserts that he is, explaining that Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet, Part VIII: The Revenge" during his final years in Southern California and revealing his tomb in Hollywood Cemetery (right behind Paramount Studios). The scene familiarly lampoons the cultural acquisitiveness and ignorance that might allow an American to believe that Shakespeare was buried not far from the elaborate graves of Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power, both of which are adorned with "Goodnight, sweet prince." But Martin is not the first to locate Shakespeare's grave in Los Angeles. Aldous Huxley does it too, in his Hollywood novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939). On first arriving in L.A., his main character, the British scholar Jeremy Pordage, is taken to a cemetery, the Beverly Pantheon (based on Forest Lawn), where he encounters.

The Tiny Church of the Poet--a miniature reproduction of Holy Trinity at Stratford-on-Avon, complete with Shakespeare's tomb and a twenty-four-hour service of organ music played automatically by the Perpetual Wurlitzer and broadcast by concealed loud speakers all over the cemetery. (10)

In Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1948), which focuses more exclusively on Forest Lawn (here called Whispering Glades), Shakespeare is cited for frankly commercial purposes, as a mortuary hostess touts "Before-Need Arrangements" by saying, "As Hamlet so beautifully writes: 'Know that death is common; all that live must die"' (53). In several other novels of Hollywood by British writers, Shakespeare (or another eminent representative of the British literary tradition) makes an appearance--comically out of place and generally associated with mortality. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, Shakespeare has come to represent "'culture' as a whole" (1), and the theme associated with Shakespeare's grave in Hollywood literature often invokes other canonical texts as representative of an Anglo-European tradition to which Americans have only attenuated access (for example, Shelley functions in Huxley's Ape and Essence in much the same way Shakespeare functions in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Brave New World). The recur rent trope of Shakespeare's California grave encapsulates an important theme in the British fiction of Hollywood: Hollywood is the site of conflicts between high and low culture, between literature and film, and between British tradition and American cultural acquisitiveness. (1)

Hollywood fiction is a regional literature of sorts, but unlike most regional literatures it is written almost entirely by outsiders, by people not native to the region. The literature of Hollywood grew out of an unprecedented collision of artistic media that came about with the development of talking pictures in the late 1920s. Established novelists, journalists, and playwrights from England and the East Coast of the United States found themselves participating in the California dream as they headed west for the lucrative living supposedly available to those skilled with the written word. Some became successful screenwriters, some merely marketed their novels or plays for screen treatment, others fled in disgust or after failing in the film industry. But many of this group incorporated their experiences in Hollywood into works of fiction.

The term "Hollywood novel" commonly evokes a handful of works: Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, Fitzgerald's unfinished The Last Tycoon, and works by John O'Hara, Horace McCoy, and Budd Schul berg. But there are many more established authors who, after coming west to work in the movies, wrote books set in Hollywood or Southern California, among them members of the so-called "British colony." British writers in Hollywood included the popular novelist Elinor Glyn (who coined the phrase "the 'It' Girl"); the prolific Edgar Wallace (who received screen credit for writing King Kong); the playwrights Ivor Novello, Jamas Fagan, and Edward Knoblock; the journalist and novelist Cedric Belfrage; and the better known novelists, J. B. Priestly, P. G. Wodehouse, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Liam O'Flaherty, Anthony Powell, Christopher Isherwood, Hugh Walpole, James Hilton, Gavin Lambert, and, in recent years, Angela Carter. Of this group, Isherwood, Belfrage, Wodehouse, O'Flaherty, Huxley, Waugh, Hilto n, Lambert, and Carter all wrote novels set in Hollywood or Southern California. Others such as Wallace, Priestly, and Powell treated Hollywood primarily in memoirs and letters, works that while not "fictional" still participate in the central myths of the genre. Wodehouse summed up the considerable British presence in the Hollywood of the 1930s: