Shakespeare; The Works of William Shakespeare – 1957; 1589-1614

by A. Smirnova; William Shakespeare

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APPEARANCE

121:19-121:26

IDENTITY

While making the documentary version of this site, I discovered the actual set of books this comes from. So the book is upside down, and also, this first volume apparently is a biography of Shakespeare’s life as well as an overview of all his creative endeavours, so without having any deeper insight than that, we can probably assume this book, as an artefact within the film, stands for anything you could possibly say about the artist. The author seems to be someone named A. Smirnova, but I couldn’t find more than that (the other author’s name turns up nothing on Google, even in the proper Cyrillic). I did note that Boris Pasternak (famous author of Dr. Zhivago (1957)), did a set of celebrated translations, but I think if these were those it would be more obvious somehow (and impressive that he would’ve accomplished such a feat the same year as his masterpiece).

SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE

The book sits on the Suite 3 book shelf for one shot only (so far as I can tell), out of the 7-8 shots of the shelf in the film entire. I almost didn’t look into it, imagining that the whole point of it being there was random Cyrillic to play off the backwards letters in Danny’s REDRUM.

MIRRORFORM SIGNIFICANCE

In any case, the book appears in a spot that almost mirrors over the appearance of CAESAR in the Torrance apartment (when Caesar‘s onscreen, backward Jack is standing next to where the Shakespeare was, axing through the wood–in fact, the copy of Caesar is in the gap made by Jack’s blows).