[In the following excerpt, Rothwell praises the outdoor settings of the Film d'Arte Italiana silent film version of The Merchant of Venice, but regrets that the film's ending has been lost.]

To modernists, Shakespeare in silent movies may seem a laughable oxymoron, but this was not how the European and American filmmakers at the beginning of the twentieth century saw it. Quite the opposite. Putting the plays of William Shakespeare on screen fit their larger design of making a disreputable industry reputable by attracting “the better classes of persons,” who scorned the scruffy nickelodeons and penny gaffs. Seeking excellence, they drew for inspiration on the resources of contemporary theater, even as they strove for some kind of filmic identity. What may look today in an old movie like egregiously ostensive acting simply represents the transferral of theatrical practices to the screen, which involved actors' developing an “attitude” before going on stage, striking statuesque poses, or arranging scenes in static tableaux. If anything, the early filmmakers erred on the side of reverence for the Bard, just as today's postmodernists play ironic games with the canon.

This new Milestone Films videocassette happily makes six of these once-inaccessible silent Shakespeare movies now accessible. Researchers will no longer need to undertake epic journeys to remote archives when, for a mere ＄29.95, they can screen on their own VCRs King John (UK, 1899), the Percy Stow Tempest (UK, 1908), the Vitagraph Midsummer Night's Dream (USA, 1909), the Film d'Arte Italiana King Lear (Italy, 1910), the Vitagraph Twelfth Night (USA, 1910), the Film d'Arte Italiana Merchant of Venice (Italy, 1910), and the F. R. Benson Richard III (UK, 1911). Doubtless this new propinquity will encourage a deluge of commentary about these ghosts from the past that have often been sneered at, scorned, mocked, and reviled. The challenge will be to reimagine the genuine excitement felt by the pioneers at the dawn of the Shakespeare movie.

.....

The colorful and exciting Lo Savio Merchant of Venice abandons stuffy indoor sets for the streets and waterways of Venice and follows the Italian practice of cutting the plot down to manageable size, this time by deleting the casket and ring subplots. This print, perhaps only because of lost footage, begins in medias res with Jessica, played by a svelte Francesca Bertini, eloping with Lorenzo. Antonio, Bassanio, and Shylock remain central to the film, the Jewish moneylender wearing a gaudy costume of gold, blue, and dark red, perhaps in sign of an outward frivolity that, like Portia's gold casket, conceals an inner darkness. Shylock's obsession with the inhuman bond is underscored by showing in closeup a holograph copy of the contract; while counterbalancing it, Portia's discovery of the law that forbids the shedding of Christian blood gets equal billing during the trial scene. Even as a plump Portia (Olga Novelli) enters the courtroom and Shylock is shown sharpening the knife, the print suddenly ends, so that we may never find out what was on the missing three hundred feet. …

These old silents should be judged not by today's cinematic standards but in the context of the cinema art of their own day. In approaching them, we should perhaps recollect Duke Theseus's advice to the condescending Philostrate: “never any thing can be amiss, / When simpleness and duty tender it.” Otherwise we may be in peril of behaving like grownups feeling superior to a stumbling toddler.