What elements are used in the film version that would not have been part of the original stage production during Shakespeare's time?

Answer 1

Screenplays are different from stageplays. A film is a play that is being viewed by one set of eyes, those of the camera, which can move anywhere, thanks to editing, at the blink of an eye. In a stageplay, everyone in the audience sees something a little different, depending on how close to or far from the action they are sitting. And generally if a stageplay wants to change the scene, you don't physically move the audience, you change the way the stage looks. But in a film, you put the camera wherever you want.

In this respect, adapting a Shakespeare play for the screen is no different from adapting a play by Ibsen or Eugene O'Neill. Actually the Shakespeare play might adapt more easily because Ibsen and O'Neill wrote with a proscenium stage in mind, with a single complex and hyper-realistic set. Shakespeare on the other hand worked with a stage that could be viewed from four directions, with seats both high and low, with people far away high in the galleries and right on the stage. This setup did not permit them to set up highly realistic duplications of the Boar's Head tavern, so they used suggestive and functional props and left a lot to the imagination. If you think about the variety of settings in a play like Henry V, you can see that it adapts much more easily to film than a claustrophobic play such as The Iceman Cometh. And indeed, Branagh's film treatment of Henry V enables us to see the horses printing their proud hoofs in the receiving earth, which we can only imagine on stage.