I have sometimes found it useful to think of the nature of film by comparing what camera and projection bring to a script with what music brings to a libretto. Whatever the strains of the comparison its point here would be to locate what it is, in any medium that can film, seriously be thought of as maintaining a connection with Shakespeare's plays, that bears the brunt of his poetry. The signal weakness in comparing the poetry of the camera (of, so to speak, the photogenetic poetry of film itself) with the music of opera is that this misses, as the comparison of film with theater generally misses, the mode of uniqueness of the events on the screen. Plays may be variously produced, and productions may or may not change in the course of a run, and may be revived; films can only be rerun or remade. You can think of the events on a screen equally as permanent and as evanescent. The poetry of the final appeals for forgiveness in The Lady Eve is accordingly a function of the way just this man and this woman half walk, half run down a path of gangways, catching themselves in an embrace on each landing, and how just this sequence of framings and attractions of the camera follow these bodies as they inflect themselves to a halt before a closed door, and just the way these voices mingle their breaths together. These moments are no more repeatable than a lifetime is. [...]

[...] In comedies of remarriage the fact of virginity is evidently not what is at stake. Yet all the more, it seems to me, is the concept of virginity still at stake, or what the fact meant is at stake something about the possession of chasteness or innocence, whatever one's physically determinable condition, whatever one's physically determinable condition, andabout whether one's valuable intactness, one's individual exclusiveness, has been well lost, that is, given over for something imaginably better, for the exclusiveness of a union. The overarching question of the comedies of remarriage is precisely the question of what constitutes a union, what makes these two into one, what binds, you may say what sanctifies in marriage. When is marriage an honorable estate? In raising this question these films imply not only that the church has lost its power over this authentication but that society as a whole cannot be granted it. In thus questioning the legitimacy of marriage, the question of the legitimacy of society is simultaneously raised, even allegorized.