This Concise Companion presents a multidisciplinary range ofapproaches to a vast multimedia subject, Shakespeare on screen. Draws on the latest thinking in cultural studies,communications, and comparative media, in dialogue with literary,theatrical and filmic approaches. Organised around themes, such as authorship and collaboration,theatricality, sex and violence, globalization and history. Offers readers a variety of accessible routes into the subjectof Shakespeare on screen. Also enables readers to explore fundamental topics in the studyof literature and culture more broadly, such as the relationshipsbetween elite and popular culture, art and the marketplace, textand image. Includes suggestions for further reading, a bibliography, afilmography, a chronology and a thorough index.
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen provides a lively guide to film and television productions adapted from Shakespeare's plays. Offering an essential resource for students of Shakespeare, the companion considers topics such as the early history of Shakespeare films, the development of 'live' broadcasts from theatre to cinema, the influence of promotion and marketing, and the range of versions available in 'world cinema'. Chapters on the contexts, genres and critical issues of Shakespeare on screen offer a diverse range of close analyses, from 'Classical Hollywood' films to the BBC's Hollow Crown series. The companion also features sections on the work of individual directors Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Vishal Bhardwaj, and is supplemented by a guide to further reading and a filmography.
This companion is a collection of critical and historical essays on the films adapted from, and inspired by, Shakespeare's plays. The emphasis is on feature films for cinema with strong coverage Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet.
The Shakespearean World takes a global view of Shakespeare and his works, especially their afterlives. Constantly changing, the Shakespeare central to this volume has acquired an array of meanings over the past four centuries. "Shakespeare" signifies the historical person, as well as the plays and verse attributed to him. It also signifies the attitudes towards both author and works determined by their receptions. Throughout the book, specialists aim to situate Shakespeare’s world and what the world is because of him. In adopting a global perspective, the volume arranges thirty-six chapters in five parts: Shakespeare on stage internationally since the late seventeenth century; Shakespeare on film throughout the world; Shakespeare in the arts beyond drama and performance; Shakespeare in everyday life; Shakespeare and critical practice. Through its coverage, The Shakespearean World offers a comprehensive transhistorical and international view of the ways this Shakespeare has not only influenced but has also been influenced by diverse cultures during 400 years of performance, adaptation, criticism, and citation. While each chapter is a freshly conceived introduction to a significant topic, all of the chapters move beyond the level of survey, suggesting new directions in Shakespeare studies – such as ecology, tourism, and new media – and making substantial contributions to the field. This volume is an essential resource for all those studying Shakespeare, from beginners to advanced specialists.
Featuring case studies, essays, and conversation pieces by scholars and practitioners, this volume explores how Indian cinematic adaptations outside the geopolitical and cultural boundaries of India are revitalizing the broader landscape of Shakespeare research, performance, and pedagogy. Chapters in this volume address practical and thematic concerns and opportunities that are specific to studying Indian cinematic Shakespeares in the West. For instance, how have intercultural encounters between Indian Shakespeare films and American students inspired new pedagogic methodologies? How has the presence and popularity of Indian Shakespeare films affected policy change at British cultural institutions? How can disagreement between eastern and western perspectives on the politics of a Shakespeare film become the site for productive cross-cultural dialogue? This is the first book to explore such complex interactions between Indian Shakespeare films and Western audiences to contribute to the assessment of the new networks that have emerged as a result of Global Shakespeare studies and practices. The volume argues that by tracking critical currents from India towards the West new insights are afforded on the wider field of Shakespeare Studies - including feminist Shakespeares, translation in Shakespeare, or the study of music in Shakespeare - and are shaping debates on the ownership and meaning of Shakespeare itself. Contributing to the current studies in Global Shakespeare, this book marks a discursive shift in the way Shakespeare on Indian screen is predominantly theorised and offers an alternative methodology for examining non-Anglophone cinematic Shakespeares as a whole.
Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright's medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.
The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has inspired interpretations in every genre and medium. This book offers perspectives on the ways in which practitioners have used Renaissance drama to address contemporary concerns and reach new audiences. It provides a resource for those interested in the creative reception of Renaissance drama.
This book explores how Bakhtin’s ideas can illuminate the compelling but uneasy fusion of Shakespeare and cinema. With a wide variety of tones, languages, cultural orientations, and thematic concerns, film directors have updated, translated, transposed, fragmented, parodied, and geographically re-situated Shakespeare. Keith Harrison illustrates how Bakhtin’s interlinked writings in various fields can fruitfully be applied to an understanding of how the ongoing responsiveness of filmmakers to Shakespeare’s historically remote words can shape self-expressive acts of co-authoring in another medium. Through the use of such Bakhtinian concepts as the chronotope, heteroglossia, the carnivalesque, and polyphony, Harrison details how filmmakers—faithful to their specific cultures, genders, geographies, and historical moments—dialogically locate their particularity through Shakespeare’s presence.
Adaptation studies has historically been neglected in both the English and Film Studies curricula. Reflecting on this, Screen Adaptation celebrates its emergence in the late 20th and 21st centuries and explores the varieties of methodologies and debates within the field. Drawing on approaches from genre studies to transtexuality to cultural materialism, the book examines adaptations of both popular and canonical writers, including William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and J.K.Rowling. Original and provocative, this book will spark new thinking and research in the field of adaptation studies. Mapping the way in which this exciting field has emerged and shifted over the last two decades, the book is also essential reading for students of English Literature and Film.
From Oscar-winning British classics to Hollywood musicals and Westerns, from Soviet epics to Bollywood thrillers, Shakespeare has inspired an almost infinite variety of films. Directors as diverse as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann and Julie Taymor have transferred Shakespeare's plays from stage to screen with unforgettable results. Spanning a century of cinema, from a silent short of 'The Tempest' (1907) to Kenneth Branagh's 'As You Like It' (2006), Daniel Rosenthal's up-to-date selection takes in the most important, inventive and unusual Shakespeare films ever made. Half are British and American productions that retain Shakespeare's language, including key works such as Olivier's 'Henry V' and 'Hamlet', Welles' 'Othello' and 'Chimes at Midnight', Branagh's 'Henry V' and 'Hamlet', Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet' and Taymor's 'Titus'. Alongside these original-text films are more than 30 genre adaptations: titles that aim for a wider audience by using modernized dialogue and settings and customizing Shakespeare's plots and characters, transforming 'Macbeth' into a pistol-packing gangster ('Joe Macbeth' and 'Maqbool') or reimagining 'Othello' as a jazz musician ('All Night Long'). There are Shakesepeare-based Westerns ('Broken Lance', 'King of Texas'), musicals ('West Side Story', 'Kiss Me Kate'), high-school comedies ('10 Things I Hate About You', 'She's the Man'), even a sci-fi adventure ('Forbidden Planet'). There are also films dominated by the performance of a Shakespearean play ('In the Bleak Midwinter', 'Shakespeare in Love'). Rosenthal emphasises the global nature of Shakespearean cinema, with entries on more than 20 foreign-language titles, including Kurosawa's 'Throne of Blood and Ran', Grigori Kozintsev's 'Russian Hamlet' and 'King Lear', and little-known features from as far afield as 'Madagascar' and 'Venezuela', some never released in Britain or the US. He considers the films' production and box-office history and examines the film-makers' key interpretive decisions in comparison to their Shakespearean sources, focusing on cinematography, landscape, music, performance, production design, textual alterations and omissions. As cinema plays an increasingly important role in the study of Shakespeare at schools and universities, this is a wide-ranging, entertaining and accessible guide for Shakespeare teachers, students and enthusiasts.
