Shakespeare Studies

This stunning adaptation tells the story of three Kings, Richard II, Henry IV & Henry V and their battle for survival. Shakespeare's epic yet intimate plays are filmed in the visually breathtaking landscape and architecture of the period. Superb performances by Ben Whishaw, Tom Hiddleston & Jeremy Irons are not to be missed. These rich films are woven with the some of Shakespeare's finest poetry.

Joss Whedon's sexy and contemporary spin on Shakespeare's classic comedy about the story of sparring lovers Beatrice and Benedick offers a sensual, tragic and occasionally absurd view of the intricate game that is love.

Six episodes combine history, biography, iconic performances, new analysis and the personal passion of its celebrated hosts Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn, Joely Richardson and David Tennant to tell the story behind the stories of Shakespeare's greatest plays.

The first installment of Shakespeare's gripping account of the rise of Hal from idle barfly to monarch-in-waiting combines compelling power politics with the hilarious antics of Falstaff, Shakespeare's greatest comic creation.

Following a London West End run in December 2007, a sold-out limited engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March 2008, and a subsequent eight-week run on Broadway, director Rupert Goold's gripping stage production of Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart in a triumphant, Tony-nominated performance filmed for television in a co-production agreement between WNET.ORG and Illuminations Television, in association with the BBC. Goold will maintain the atmosphere and tone of the critically acclaimed stage production which relocates the action to a nameless 20th-century underground facility, offering a parable of the quest for power in the modern world.

Presents the Franco Zefferelli production of Shakespeare's tragedy about two teenagers who fall in love, encounter opposition from their families, and take their lives.

Shipwrecked on an unfriendly Illyrian shore, Viola, believing her twin brother is dead, disguises herself in male attire and joins the retinue of the lovesick Duke Orsino.

The Tudor Court is locked in a power struggle between its nobles and the Machiavellian Cardinal Wolsey, the King's first minister and the country's most conspicuous symbol of Catholic power. Wolsey's ambition knows no bounds and when his chief ally, Queen Katherine, interferes in the King's romance with Ann Bullen, he brings ruin upon himself, the Queen and centuries of English obedience to Rome. Henry VIII played to critical acclaim at the Globe in 2010.

Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire explores the desires and the futures of Shakespeare's language and cinematographic adaptations of Shakespeare. Tracing ways that film offers us a rich new understanding of Shakespeare, Simon Ryle highlights issues that are central to both Shakespeare and film: media technologies, narrative territories and flows, mourning and loss, the voice, the body, sexuality and gender.

How the study of Shakespeare's legacy, specifically in film and television, can radically challenge what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as "faithful" or "unfaithful" to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin challenges these critical orthodoxies. Instead, recognizing how a film or television series closely recalls Shakespeare's drama encourages an interrogation of what we consider to be "Shakespeare" in the first place. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's model of the uncanny--the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity--this book focuses on films and television series that were not marketed as adaptations of Shakespeare.

As readers head into the second fifty years of the modern critical study of blackness and black characters in Renaissance drama, it has become a critical commonplace to note black female characters' almost complete absence from Shakespeare's plays. Despite this physical absence, however, they still play central symbolic roles in articulating definitions of love, beauty, chastity, femininity, and civic and social standing, invoked as the opposite and foil of women who are "fair". Beginning from this recognition of black women's simultaneous physical absence and imaginative presence, this book argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women's often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a vital staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare's world, and our own.

A range of mainstream and independent English language film productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice take centre stage in Queering the Shakespeare Film. This study critiques the various representations of the queer - broadly understood as that which is at odds with what has been deemed to be the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant, particularly - but not exclusively - as regards sexual matters, in the Shakespeare film.

This study reexamines the recognized ""canon"" of films based on Shakespeare's plays, arguing that it should be broadened by breaking with two unnecessary standards: the characterization of the director as ""auteur"" of a play's screen adaptation, and with the convention of excluding films with contemporary language or modern or alternative settings or which use the play as a subtext. Emphasis is shifted from the director's contribution, to the film's social, cultural and historical contexts. The work of the auteurs is reevaluated within contemporary contexts, preserving the established canon while proposing new criteria for inclusion.

Hamlet is the most often produced play in the western literary canon, and a fertile global source for film adaptation. Samuel Crowl, a noted scholar of Shakespeare on film, unpacks the process of adapting from text to screen through concentrating on two sharply contrasting film versions of Hamlet by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996). The films’ socio-political contexts are explored, and the importance of their screenplay, film score, setting, cinematography and editing examined.

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. 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.

Shakespeare and World Cinema radically re-imagines the field of Shakespeare on film, drawing on a wealth of examples from Africa, the Arctic, Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Tibet, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. Mark Thornton Burnett explores the contemporary significance of Shakespeare cinema outside the Hollywood mainstream for the first time, arguing that these adaptations are an essential part of the story of Shakespearean performance and reception. The book reveals in unique detail the scope, inventiveness and vitality of over seventy films that have undeservedly slipped beneath the radar of critical attention and also discusses regional Shakespeare cinema in Latin America and Asia. Utilising original interviews with filmmakers throughout, it introduces new auteurs, analyses multiple adaptations of plays such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet and pioneers fresh methodologies for understanding the role that Shakespeare continues to play in the international marketplace.

This book is the first in-depth cultural history of cinema's polyvalent and often contradictory appropriations of Shakespearean drama and performance traditions. The author argues that these adapatations have helped shape multiple aspects of film, from cinematic style to genre and narrative construction.