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In this lively study of both modern film and stage productions of Shakespeare, Samuel Crowl provides fascinating insights into the ways in which these productions have been influenced by one another as well as by contemporary developments in critical approaches to Shakespeare's plays. Crowl's study demonstrates the surprising resonances between Roman Polanski's 1971 film of Macbeth and Adrian Noble's heralded recent production of the play for The Royal Shakespeare Company; argues that Orson Welles's films of Othello and Cabins at Midnight are not only brilliant remaining of Shakespeare in another art form but make a powerful contribution to our contemporary understanding of performance as in...
Spectacular Shakespeare includes an introduction, nine essays, and an afterword that all address the spectacle of Shakespeare in recent Hollywood films. The essays approach the Shakespeare-as-star phenomenon from various perspectives, some applauding the popularization of the Bard, others critically questioning the appropriation of Shakespeare in contemporary mass culture.
Filmed Shakespeare criticism has largely centred on aesthetic critiques of filmic devices, or on comparisons between the film and the source text. Employing a new angle, this book explores the reasons why contemporary filmed Shakespeare prompts cultural anxiety about high-culture adaptation.
Samuel Crowl's 'Shakespeare at the Cineplex' explores the major Shakespeare films released since the surprising success of Kenneth Branagh's 'Henry V' in 1989.
"This book is about the way in which Shakespeare's plays have inspired readers to "talk back" and about some of the forms such talking back can assume. It is also about the way different interpretive communities, including students, read their cultural, political, and moral assumptions into Shakespeare's plays, appropriating and transforming elements of plot, character, and verbal text while challenging what they see as the ideological premises of the plays. Texts that talk back to Shakespeare pose questions, offer alternatives, take liberties, and fill in gaps. Some of the transformations discussed in Talking Back to Shakespeare challenge deeply held assumptions such as, for instance, that ...
Written with verve and insight by an award-winning teacher and scholar, Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide is the ideal introduction to film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays from the silent era tot the present.
Kenneth Branagh is the most important contemporary figure in the production of filmed Shakespeare. His five feature-length Shakespeare films, Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996), Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) and As You Like It (2007) both created and represented the explosion of filmed Shakespeare adaptations that began in the 1990s. This book demonstrates Branagh’s appeal to classical film genres in order to meta-narrate for a popular audience the unfamiliar terrain of the Shakespearean original; it examines the debts Branagh owes, stylistically and structurally, to classically-defined generic modes. The generic appeal in Branagh’s films is one that grows pro...
Shakespeare and Venice is the first book length study to describe and chronicle the mythology of Venice that was formulated in the Middle Ages and has persisted in fiction and film to the present day. Graham Holderness focuses specifically on how that mythology was employed by Shakespeare to explore themes of conversion, change, and metamorphosis. Identifying and outlining the materials having to do with Venice which might have been available to Shakespeare, Holderness provides a full historical account of past and present Venetian myths and of the city's relationship with both Judaism and Islam. Holderness also provides detailed readings of both The Merchant of Venice and of Othello against these mythical and historical dimensions, and concludes with discussion of Venice's relevance to both the modern world and to the past.
This addition to the Shakespeare on Screen series reveals the remarkable presence of Macbeth in the global Shakespearean screenscape. What is it about Macbeth that is capable of extending beyond Scottish contexts and speaking globally, locally and “glocally”? Does the extensive adaptive reframing ofMacbeth suggest the paradoxical irrelevance of the original play? After examining the evident topic of the supernatural elements—the witches and the ghost—in the films, the essays move from a revisitation of the well-known American screen versions, to an analysis of more recent Anglophone productions and to world cinema (Asia, France, South Africa, India, Japan, etc.). Questions of lineage...