Overview

Shakespeare and the English-speaking Cinema is a lively, authoritative, and innovative overview of the ways in which Shakespeare's plays have been adapted for cinema. Organised by topics rather than chronology, it offers detailed commentary on significant films, including both 'mainstream' and 'canonical' works by such directors as Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Franco Zeffirelli, and Kenneth Branagh, and such ground-breaking movies as Derek Jarman's The Tempest, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books. Chapters on the location of films in place and time, the effect of this on characterisation, and issues of gender and political power are followed by a discussion of work that goes 'beyond Shakespeare. A filmography and suggestions for further reading complete this stimulating, fresh, and accessible account of an important aspect of Shakespeare studies

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9780199659463

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Reviews

generous and intelligent book Emma Smith, Times Literary Supplement

a mine of information supported by thorough, well-documented archival research ... it clearly has its place on the shelves of all who either wish to have an entertaining introduction into the most important feature films based on Shakespearean texts, or who enjoy being challenged out of old assumptions and made to think and rethink their former opinions. * Kinga Foldvary, Sixteenth Century Journal * Jackson knows what he is doing. His final injunction to his readers recalls Heminge and Condell: watch the films again-and again . This generous and intelligent book will certainly help them do just that. * Emma Smith, The Times Literary Supplement * With its generous range of examples and immediately accessible perspectives such as gender, Shakespeare and the English-Speaking Cinema is a valuable resource for students of Adaptation Studies, providing a brief but largely complete overview of Shakespeare on film. * Anna Blackwell, Modern Language Review *

Author Information

Russell Jackson is Allardyce Nicoll Professor of Drama in the University of Birmingham, where his research and teaching have focused on theatre history, film and Shakespearean performance. His recent publications include he Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception (CUP, 2007), and Theatres on Film: how the Cinema imagines the Stages (Manchester University Press, 2013). He has been text consultant on many theatre and film productions including Kenneth Branagh's films of Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Love's Labours Lost and As You Like It, and stage productions directed by Michael Grandage -- including Othello, King Lear and Richard II at the Donmar Theatre, Twelfth Night and Hamlet at Wyndham's Theatre, and A Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry V at the Noël Coward Theatre.

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