Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Author: Samuel Crowl
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2014-01-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1472538935

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. Offering an analysis of two of the most important figures in the history of film adaptations of Shakespeare, this study seeks to understand a variety of cinematic approaches to translating Shakespeare's “words, words, words” into film's particular grammar and rhetoric

Cinematic Shakespeare

Cinematic Shakespeare
Author: Michael A. Anderegg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2004
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780742510920

Michael Anderegg investigates how Shakespeare films constitute an exciting & ever-changing film genre. He looks closely at films by Olivier, Welles, & Branagh, as well as postmodern Shakespeares & multiple adaptations over the years of 'Romeo and Juliet'.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy
Author: Michael Neill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 993
Release: 2016-08-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191036145

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy presents fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The opening section explores ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of 'Shakespearean' tragedy, and addresses questions of genre by examining the playwright's inheritance from the classical and medieval past. The second section is devoted to current textual issues, while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The book's final section expands readers' awareness of Shakespeare's global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and East Asia.

Janespotting and Beyond

Janespotting and Beyond
Author: Eckart Voigts-Virchow
Publisher: Gunter Narr Verlag
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2004
Genre: Cultural industries
ISBN: 9783823360964

A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation

A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation
Author: Deborah Cartmell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2014-08-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1118917537

This is a comprehensive collection of original essays that explore the aesthetics, economics, and mechanics of movie adaptation, from the days of silent cinema to contemporary franchise phenomena. Featuring a range of theoretical approaches, and chapters on the historical, ideological and economic aspects of adaptation, the volume reflects today’s acceptance of intertextuality as a vital and progressive cultural force. Incorporates new research in adaptation studies Features a chapter on the Harry Potter franchise, as well as other contemporary perspectives Showcases work by leading Shakespeare adaptation scholars Explores fascinating topics such as ‘unfilmable’ texts Includes detailed considerations of Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Shakespeare in the Cinema

Shakespeare in the Cinema
Author: Stephen M. Buhler
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0791489752

Offering a comprehensive look at the strategies that filmmakers have employed in adapting Shakespeare's plays to the cinema, this book investigates what the task of Shakespearean adaptation reveals about film in general and focuses on patterns and approaches shared by various cinematic works. Buhler provides concise histories of each general strategy, which include non-illusionistic cinema, documentary interpretations, mass-market productions, transgressive and transnational cinema, and approaches that see film as either distinct from the stage or as an extension of theatrical traditions. The book spans more than a century of film, starting with the 1899 King John and extending through Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julie Taymor's Titus, and later releases.

Shakespeare in the Movies

Shakespeare in the Movies
Author: Douglas Brode
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2000-04-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 019972802X

Shakespeare is now enjoying perhaps his most glorious--certainly his most popular--filmic incarnation. Indeed, the Bard has been splashed across the big screen to great effect in recent adaptations of Hamlet, Henry V, Othello, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and of course in the hugely successful Shakespeare in Love. Unlike previous studies of Shakespeare's cinematic history, Shakespeare in the Movies proceeds chronologically, in the order that plays were written, allowing the reader to trace the development of Shakespeare as an author--and an auteur--and to see how the changing cultural climate of the Elizabethans flowered into film centuries later. Prolific film writer Douglas Brode provides historical background, production details, contemporary critical reactions, and his own incisive analysis, covering everything from the acting of Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Gwyneth Paltrow, to the direction of Orson Welles, Kenneth Branagh, and others. Brode also considers the many films which, though not strict adaptations, contain significant Shakespearean content, such as West Side Story and Kurosawa's Ran and Throne of Blood. Nor does Brode ignore the ignoble treatment the master has sometimes received. We learn, for instance, that the 1929 version of The Taming of the Shrew (which featured the eyebrow-raising writing credit: "By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor"), opens not so trippingly on the tongue--PETRUCHIO: "Howdy Kate." KATE: "Katherine to you, mug." For anyone wishing to cast a backward glance over the poet's film career and to better understand his current big-screen popularity, Shakespeare in the Movies is a delightful and definitive guide.

Shakespeare on Film

Shakespeare on Film
Author: Judith R. Buchanan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2014-07-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1317874978

From the earliest days of the cinema to the present, Shakespeare has offered a tempting bank of source material than the film industry has been happy to plunder. Shakespeare on Film deftly examines an extensive range of films that have emerged from the curious union of an iconic dramatist with a medium of mass appeal. The many films Buchanan studies are shown to be telling indicators of trends in Shakespearean performance interpretation, illuminating markers of developments in the film industry and culturally revealing about broader influences in the world beyond the movie theatre. As with other titles from the Inside Film series, the book is illustrated throughout with stills. Each chapter concludes with a list of suggested further reading in the field.

Filming Shakespeare's Plays

Filming Shakespeare's Plays
Author: Anthony Davies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1990-06-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521399135

Shakespeare's plays provide wonderfully challenging material for the film maker. While acknowledging that dramatic experiences for theatre and cinema audiences are significantly different, this book reveals some of the special qualities of cinema's dramatic language in the film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays by four directors - Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa - each of whom has a distinctly different approach to a film representation. Davies begins his study with a comparison of theatrical and cinematic space showing that the dramatic resources of cinema are essentially spatial. The central chapters focus on Laurence Olivier's Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III; Orson Welles' Macbeth, Othello and Chimes at Midnight; Peter Brook's King Lear and Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. Davies discusses the dramatic problems posed by the source plays for these films for the film maker and he examines how these films influenced later theatrical stagings. He concludes with an examination of the demands that distinguish the work of the Shakespearean stage actor from that of his counterpart in film.

The Making of the National Poet : Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769

The Making of the National Poet : Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769
Author: Michael Dobson
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 1992-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191591718

The first full-length study since the 1920s of the Restoration and eighteenth-century's revisions and revaluations of Shakespeare, and the first to consider the period's much-reviled stage adaptions in the context of the profound cultural changes of their times. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Dobson examines how and why Shakespeare was retrospectively claimed as both a respectable Enlightenment author and a crucial and contested symbol of British national identity. The book provides thorough analysis, both engaging and informative, the definitive account of the theatre's role in establishing Shakespeare as Britain's National Poet. - ;The century between the Restoration and David Garrick's Stratford Jubilee saw William Shakespeare's promotion from the status of archaic, rustic playwright to that of England's timeless Bard, and with it the complete transformation of the ways in which his plays were staged, published, and read. But why Shakespeare, and what different interests did this process serve? The Making of the National Poet is the first full-length study since the 1920s of the Restoration and eighteenth century's revisions and revaluations of Shakespeare, and the first to consider the period's much-reviled stage adaptations in the context of the profound cultural changes in which they participate. Drawing on a wide range of evidence - including engravings, prompt-books, diaries, statuary, and previously unpublished poems (among them traces of the hitherto mysterious Shakespeare Ladies' Club) - it examines how and why Shakespeare was retrospectively claimed as both a respectable Enlightenment author and a crucial and contested symbol of British national identity. It shows in particular how the deification of Shakespeare co-existed with, and even demanded, the drastic and sometimes bizarre rewriting of his plays for which the period is notorious. The book provides thorough analysis, both engaging and informative, the definitive account of the theatre's role in establishing Shakespeare as Britain's National Poet. -