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.

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.

This Concise Companion presents a multidisciplinary range ofapproaches to a vast multimedia subject, Shakespeare on screen. Draws on the latest thinking in cultural studies,communications, and comparative media, in dialogue with literary,theatrical and filmic approaches. Organised around themes, such as authorship and collaboration,theatricality, sex and violence, globalization and history. Offers readers a variety of accessible routes into the subjectof Shakespeare on screen. Also enables readers to explore fundamental topics in the studyof literature and culture more broadly, such as the relationshipsbetween elite and popular culture, art and the marketplace, textand image. Includes suggestions for further reading, a bibliography, afilmography, a chronology and a thorough index.

Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An afterword, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

This collection of essays examines the ways in which recent Shakespeare films portray anxieties about an impending global wasteland, technological alienation, spiritual destruction, and the effects of globalization. Films covered include Titus, William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, Almereyda's Hamlet, Revengers Tragedy, Twelfth Night, The Passion of the Christ, Radford's The Merchant of Venice, The Lion King, and Godard's King Lear, among others that directly adapt or reference Shakespeare. Essays chart the apocalyptic mise-en-scenes, disorienting imagery, and topsy-turvy plots of these films, using apocalypse as a theoretical and thematic lens.

Here, essays use the latest theories in postcolonialism, globalization, and post-nationalism to explore how world cinema and theater respond to Bollywood's representation of Shakespeare. In this collection, Shakespeare is both part of an elite Western tradition and a window into a vibrant post-national identity founded by a global consumer culture.

This engaging and stimulating book argues that Shakespeare's plays significantly influenced movie genres in the twentieth century, particularly in films concerning love in the classic Hollywood period. Shakespeare's 'green world' has a close functional equivalent in 'tinseltown' and on 'the silver screen', as well as in hybrid genres in Bollywood cinema. Meanwhile, Romeo and Juliet continues to be an enduring source for romantic tragedy on screen. The nature of generic indebtedness has not gained recognition because it is elusive and not always easy to recognise. The book traces generic links between Shakespeare's comedies of love and screen genres such as romantic comedy, 'screwball' comedy and musicals, as well as clarifying the use of common conventions defining the genres, such as mistaken identity, 'errors', disguise and 'shrew-taming'. Speculative, challenging and entertaining, the book will appeal to those interested in Shakespeare, movies and the representation of love in narratives.