Shakespeare and film

Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted for the cinema since 1899 in multiple film genres, including silent film, film noire, Western, theatrical film, and Hollywood films.
    This course examines Shakespeare’s  romance play, histories, tragedies, and comedies, including the lesser-known plays, and their adaptations on screen, with a focus on the themes of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

PLAYS & FILMS

• Love’s Labour’s Lost (comedy; Branagh)
• King John (history; Dickson & Dando, 1899)
• Henry V (history; Olivier; Branagh)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (comedy;
Hoffman; Reinhaardt; Taymor)
• Titus Andronicus (tragedy; Taymor)
• Othello (tragedy; Oliver Parker; Pier Paolo
Pasolini)
• Richard III (history; Richard Loncraine)
• Winter’s Tale (romance; Howell; Rohmer)

The opening to Julie Taymor’s 2010 version of The Tempest offers a close-up camera shot of a dark turreted castle. Enormous drops of rain begin to batter the battlements as the edifice dissolves, revealing how the towers and turrets are no more than a moulded sandcastle held in the palm of Miranda’s hand. As this essay confirms, the image of the melting sandcastle was not new for Taymor, who used the same visual reference in her staged production from the 1980s. Preserved in an obscure children's show, this original production choice demonstrates Taymor's close affinity with a theatrical effect that she transfers with little alteration to the movie screen.

One of the most prominent and most frequently cited characteristics of postmodernist intellectual production is intertextuality. The interdependence of all texts in the broader sense of the word, meaning all symbolic products, consciously manifests itself in the structure of the texts themselves and is indeed often one of their most salient features. As a result of this, it has become not only useful but crucial, when interpreting texts and even in order to understand them on a basic level, to be acquainted with a relatively large number of other texts, sometimes very specific ones (cf. Lešić 2003: 35-36).

Lubitsch’s 'To Be or Not to Be,' filmed in 1941 and released in early 1942, is an unabashed comedy which takes place (for the most part) in the occupied Warsaw during World War II. It addresses one of the most urgent questions of its own historical moment – but also of our contemporary conjuncture: the question of the relationship between political power and theater, spectacle, or performance, or more specifically, the question of the theatrical nature of power itself. The thesis pursued by the author is not simply the claim that politicians often make use of theatrical exaggeration and deception in their public appearances; the point is, rather, that the structure of power relations itself is theatrical. In order to pursue this point, the author analyses three instances of the Shylock monologue in the film and focuses on the explicitly theatrical nature of each instance as a kind of “play within play.” Following Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of the dumb-show in Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the play’s “primal scene,” as a way in which the play figures itself, the author argues in the second part of the article that we can perhaps find such a scene in Lubitsch’s 'To Be or Not to Be' as well. Commenting on the final meeting of the main protagonist, Polish actor-turned-resistance hero Joseph Tura, with his nemesis SS Colonel Ehrhardt, the author suggests that the primal scene of the film is a contest as to “who is the real Hamlet,” which is to say, who can claim to represent the modern subjectivity as such. It turns out that for Lubitsch, the political destiny of modernity depends on taking theatrical performance completely seriously – even if it is a comedy.

There are over 50 film versions of Hamlet. This article looks at how four directors use film language to depict the words of Hamlet's soliloquy ( "To be or not to be")  and examines how production design, props, costume, camera movements and editing are used to create different meanings though the text is unchanged.

In 1996, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet burst onto the screen and it effectively established the modern genre of teen Shakespeare films. Luhrmann’s film appealed to contemporary audiences by using their own media language - fast paced action; young, attractive superstars; and a depiction of media itself that was a pervasive element of daily life in the nineties. Indeed, Luhrmann’s film is as much about late twentieth century media as it is about Shakespeare’s “star-cross’d lovers.”  Luhrmann alters the fundamental motivations of the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet and creates a tragedy motivated and exacerbated by modern mass media where too much information is juxtaposed against not enough.

This article deals with Rupert Goold’s film version of Macbeth (2010). Based on a stage production, this film is set in an unspecified Soviet country. I will analyze Goold’s creation of a stage-to-screen hybrid recording framed as a surveillance film. Relying on Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s works as well as various contributions made by Cultural Materialist and New Historicist critics, I intend to explore the power relations in this surveillance film. I will also examine how the surveillance film conventions deployed by Goold turn the narrative into a meta-filmic event. This allows the viewer to perceive surveillance as part of the subject matter of the story and as inseparable from its narrative structure. Eventually, this will serve to explore how surveillance entirely transforms the filmscape. What begins as a film set in a surveillance society ends up as an environment dominated by a society of control.

Study of Shakespeare on film has attended much more to the visual differences between early modern theatre and modern cinema than to the aural differences between these artistic media. This essay considers Shakespeare’s Macbeth in its earliest performances and in a celebrated Japanese film adaptation. The off-stage sounds used by the King’s Men form a distinct pattern of suspense and surprise (a soundscape) that Akira Kurosawa successfully translated to his film "Throne of Blood."

This paper argues that a viewer watching Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles, can more narrowly focus upon the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. In Shakespeare's Othello two objects dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. I consider the ways in which a South Indian, a North Indian "Bollywood" and an Italian teen movie adaptation of Othello permit these objects to act expressively. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the "tragic loading" of the bed, in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy.

http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show

La presente mesa redonda se plantea explorar los procesos de recreación del Renacimiento que se han desarrollado en la cultura de finales de siglo XX en ficciones cinematográficas y literarias, considerados dentro del contexto del paradigma posmoderno de los estudios renacentistas. La discusión se centrará en la exploración de tres áreas específicas y complementarias de la representación en la narrativa y el cine de la época isabelina llevada a cabo en los últimos años. Las áreas que se analizan son: 1) el uso de la figura del propio dramaturgo como personaje en cine y literatura, que articula una renovada fascinación por el concepto de autoría; 2) la representación de la monarquía renacentista como estructura de poder en los retratos cinematográficos de la reina Isabel I, que expresa preocupaciones e inquietudes contemporáneas sobre dicha institución y su papel en la sociedad británica actual y 3) la reconstrucción del mundo del teatro en películas recientes, en un momento en el que el acercamiento académico al Renacimiento presta gran atención a los aspectos de escenificación del teatro de la época.

Note that these are page proofs, and my middle name (Blakeley) is misspelled!

In Michael K. Bourdaghs, Hoyt Long, and Reginald Jackson, ed., Performance and Japanese Literature (Vol. 15, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, 2014), pp. 49-57.

The paper examines how  Akira Kurosawa used Noh theater in his film Throne of Blood, via just one example: the opening and closing chanting sequence. The wider argument is that although there are studies that elucidate Kurosawa’s sources (especially his use of Noh masks, based on Kurosawa’s own comments) or that make generalized comments about Noh (often stereotypes) meant to clarify Kurosawa’s appropriations, because the scholars do not really understand Noh, or the Buddhist underpinnings of Noh, they do not see how Kurosawa has translated those literary and visual sources to achieve very different effects.

For undergraduate students and their teachers, this book surveys present-day stage and screen performances of early modern drama, introducing performance-oriented methodologies and pedagogies designed to complement text-based analysis. For academics, it brings together the criticism of leading performance scholars and practitioners, with extensive appendices listing performances for reference purposes.

Chapters:
1. Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince, Introduction
2. Lucy Munro, The Early Modern Repertory and the Performance of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
3. Jeremy Lopez, The Seeds of Time: Student Theatre and the Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
4. Farah Karim-Cooper, The Performance of Early Modern Drama at Shakespeare’s Globe
5. Coen Heijes, Shakespeare’s Contemporaries at the Royal Shakespeare Company
6. Jacquelyn Bessell, The Actors’ Renaissance Season at the Blackfriars Playhouse
7. Rebecca McCutcheon and Sarah Thom, Dido, Queen of Carthage: Site-specific Marlowe
8. Roberta Barker, ‘A Freshly Creepy Reality’: Jacobean Tragedy and Realist Acting on the Contemporary Stage
9. Pascale Aebischer, Early Modern Drama on Screen
10. Jonathan Heron, Nicholas Monk and Paul Prescott, Letting the Dead Come Out to Dance: An Embodied and Spatial Approach to Teaching Early Modern Drama

Appendices:
11. Karin Brown, Professional Productions of Early Modern Drama, 1960-2010
12. Jeremy Lopez, Performances of Early Modern Drama at Academic Institutions Since 1909
13. Jeremy Lopez, Performances of Early Modern Plays by Amateur and Student Groups Since 1887

Selected bibliography"

Traditionally, both criticism and adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth tend to present the titular female character as monstrous. Lady Macbeth is often portrayed as ambitious and manipulative, without any enquiry into her motivations. Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2004 Maqbool is unique in cinematic Shakespearean adaptations in that it gives Nimmi (Lady Macbeth) a complex backstory, as well as pressing motivations for actively instigating and carrying out Abba-ji (Duncan)’s murder.
This paper will explore how Bhardwaj successfully adapted several elements suggested in the text (such as isolation, impotence, and ambition), analysing Bhardwaj’s strategy for translating the play into an Indian context and looking into the specific changes that result in a relatable female character, taking into account issues such as the present situation of women in India.
The changes Bhardwaj made to the text—namely transforming it into a love story—result in a Lady Macbeth character that, far from being monstrous, is compelling. Bhardwaj successfully translated several elements and created in Nimmi a character that is both “faithful” to the Lady Macbeth characteristics and a humanized, relatable woman. Bhardwaj’s version helps redeem the vilified Lady Macbeth character.

A summary of the view expressed in Mr. Marker's essay that the 1948 production of Macbeth was a veiled depiction of the communist witch hunts of the of the "First Red Scare." The original essay was published in Literature Film Quarterly 41.2: 116-128 (April 2013).

This chapter foregrounds transculturation as a cultural practice performed through adaptation with reference to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool, a 2003 adaptation of Macbeth set in Mumbai that doubles as a gangster film. Thematically, two aspects inform processes of cultural recontextualization in Bhardwaj’s film: the Hindi film industry’s fascination with the Muslim-dominated Mumbai underworld, and the trope of corruption. The ways these intersecting themes undergird the transculturation of Macbeth in India make Bhardwaj’s work a particularly interesting case of Shakespearean adaptation. The thematic anchor of this chapter is the trope of corruption as my arguments are based on two senses of the word: corruption as dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, such as that involving bribery; and corruption as a synonym of intertextuality and intermediality, a “mashup” of an “original” or “source” text.

Elizabethan world picture, one of the key texts in defining the importance of the Cosmic Order and the Chain of Being, claims that the world picture was still solidly theocentric (2). Furthermore, the microcosm, resembled much the macrocosm, respectively with the man and God on the top of the hierarchy. Secondly, the question of sovereignty was a highly debated one, and people constantly sought to find the origin of the monarch's right to rule. As Allen in Shakespeare and the Law, edited by Daniela Carpi puts it: In the last years of the sixteenth century, people began to speculate about the origin of political authority and the nature of political obligation, about the question as to where sovereignty lays in England. (81) Claudia Marin 2

This guide surveys key media resources on Shakespeare's Macbeth: recordings of live performances; podcasts; feature-length films; audio recordings;  History / context / discussion; lectures; other film adaptations; games and quizzes; further reading.

Film versions of Macbeth date back to the earliest days of silent film. Since then a wide variety of famous actors and directors attempting to put their stamp on the Scottish Tragedy. Notable also is the global dimension as more films, clips and resources become easier to access through YouTube. Increasingly, live performances are also being documented and are sometimes distributed online streaming, or via DVD.

More recently we have had animations and even robotic versions of the play. Students can work through teacher-led exam-focused close analysis of the text, or watch short clips of amateur or professional actors offering their interpretations of Macbeth.

Me, poor man, mv libran' Was dukedom large enough: of temporal royalties He thinks me now incapable . . . (The Tempest, Our project is concerned u'ith the cultural "appropriation" of the Shakespearean canon as an asencv through which culture generates meaning.r We assume that $'orkine on Shakespeare through cinema "allows us to put this haditionally sanctioned body of writing into provoking new relations with contemporarv fechnology" (Wheale, "scratching" 205).

Abstract
              This paper presents ideas about how the ‘role of nature’ plays a great role for Shakespeare’s tragedy ‘King Lear’ and how ecocriticism goes with this tragedy. Role of nature is broken down into several points, explaining how human beings as part of nature get affected by either their own choice or by others’ actions, illustrating the changes in human beings in reference to change in the environment, and concluding the study by merging historic tragic events with what is presented in the play.

Key words: Ecocriticism, imagery, manner, nature, order, relationship, tragedy.

The mysterious letters M.O.A.I. which appear in the billet doux which brings Malvolio to ruin in Twelfth Night have vexed scholars and commentators for 400 years. Now, at last, the letters are deciphered and Shakespeare's source(s) identified. Enjoy!

This paper attempts to illustrate Tagore's humility and magnanimity with which he portrays some of the great characters of his short stories. The paper shows Tagore's deep love and affection that brought him closer to his fellowmen and women around him and how he assessed the people of different race and social status and those steeped in pains and poverty. The paper throws light on Tagore's art of characterization by referring to some of his universally appealing characters who are found facing and fighting many social and existential battles in life. The paper further explores Tagore's deep insight into their battles of daily reality as the cornerstone of his art which paints some fictional characters with profound touches of humanity. The paper finally provides an assessment of Tagore's persistent feeling of sympathy and his anti racist stand which make him a revolutionary humanist. His in-depth observation of human sufferings and concern for mankind produce such characters as Hoimonti, Kabuliwala, Ratan and many more moving characters who will continue to resonate for generations in human minds. Rabindranath Tagore, no doubt, is the cultural icon of this subcontinent. A versatile genius, Tagore tried his hand successfully in all the genres of literary studies. An essayist, 1

In some modern film adaptations of Shakespeare’s comedies, the female characters appear to yield power over the male characters. It is essential to look beyond the deceptive surfaces of the plays and films, and scrutinise the representation of seemingly empowered females in the comedies. Organised in three sections, this paper focuses on the portrayal of women in film adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night. Firstly, Franco Zeffirelli’s popular version of The Taming of the Shrew (1967) is contrasted with a contemporary teenage adaptation, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). Secondly, Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night (1996) is compared to another teenage adaptation, She's The Man (2006). In these films, Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew and Viola in Twelfth Night are associated with female empowerment and popular notions of “Girl Power”. It appears that these modern adaptations promote liberal views of gender and identity as the female characters are depicted to possess great autonomy and freedom. Beneath the illusion of popular notions of women’s empowerment, the film adaptations undermine the authority of strong female characters. I posit that the films’ representations of feminism constitute a form of “fake” feminism that creates a mirage of empowered female characters who, on closer inspection, are subjected to conservative models of gender essentialism and compulsory heterosexuality. As stated by Keller and Stratyner, Shakespeare’s work has become the twenty-first century’s mythology, a cultural shorthand for dispositions, predicaments, preoccupations, aesthetics, poetics, and ideologies (3). Hence, this paper concludes in the third section by examining how Shakespeare’s cultural authority is employed by the films to endorse patriarchal ideologies and “fake” feminism.