This edition of A History of Shakespeare on Screen updates the chronology to 2003, with a new chapter on recent films.

Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television examines recent film and television transformations of William Shakespeare's drama by focusing on the ways in which modern directors acknowledge and respond to the perceived authority of Shakespeare as author, text, cultural icon, theatrical tradition, and academic institution. This study explores two central questions. First, what efforts do directors make to justify their adaptations and assert an interpretive authority of their own? Second, how do those self-authorizing gestures impact upon the construction of gender, class, and ethnic identity within the filmed adaptations of Shakespeare's plays? The chosen films and television series considered take a wide range of approaches to the adaptative process - some faithfully preserve the words of Shakespeare; others jettison the Early Modern language in favor of contemporary idiom; some recreate the geographic and historical specificity of the original plays, and others transplant the plot to fresh settings. The wealth of extra-textual material now available with film and television distribution and the numerous website tie-ins and interviews offer the critic a mine of material for accessing the ways in which directors perceive the looming Shakespearean shadow and justify their projects. Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television places these directorial claims alongside the film and television plotting and aesthetic to investigate how such authorizing gestures shape the presentation of gender, class, and ethnicity.

In the past two decades, Othello has tried out for the basketball team, Macbeth has taken over a fast food joint and King Lear has moved to an Iowa farm--Shakespeare is everywhere in popular culture. This collection of essays addresses the use of Shakespearean narratives, themes, imagery and characterizations in non-Shakespearian cinema. The essays explore how Shakespeare and his work are manipulated within the popular media and explore topics such as racism, jealousy, misogyny and nationality. The submissions concentrate on film and television programs that are adaptations of Shakespearean plays, including My Own Private Idaho, CSI-Miami, A Thousand Acres, Prospero's Books, O, 10 Things I Hate About You, Withnail and I, Get Over It, and The West Wing. Each chapter includes notes and a list of works cited. A full bibliography completes the work; it is divided into bibliographies and filmographies, general studies and essays, derivatives based on a single play, derivatives based on several, and derivatives based on Shakespeare as a character. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Towards the end of the 1980s it looked as if television had displaced cinema as the photographic medium for bringing Shakespeare to the modern audience. In recent years there has been a renaissance of Shakespearian cinema, including Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing, Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books and Christine Edzard's As You Like It. In this volume a range of writers study the best known and most entertaining film, television and video versions of Shakespeare's plays. Particular attention is given to the work of Olivier, Zeffirelli and Kurosawa, and to the BBC Television series. In addition the volume includes a survey of previous scholarship and an invaluable filmography.

Shakespeare is everywhere in contemporary media culture. This book explores the reasons for this dissemination and reassemblage. Ranging widely over American TV drama, it discusses the use of citations in Westworld and The Wire, demonstrating how they tap into but also transform Shakespeare’s preferred themes and concerns. It then examines the presentation of female presidents in shows such as Commander in Chief and House of Cards, revealing how they are modelled on figures of female sovereignty from his plays. Finally, it analyses the specifically Shakespearean dramaturgy of Deadwood and The Americans. Ultimately, the book brings into focus the way serial TV drama appropriates Shakespeare in order to give voice to the unfinished business of the American cultural imaginary.

Examines the BBC productions of all thirty-seven Shakespeare plays, discussing how the plays were adapted for television and the different approaches taken by each play's director

Shakespeare's works are constantly being translated into new contexts, a fact which demonstrates the vitality of his plots in contemporary settings. Shakespeare Translated looks at the way certain plays - particularly Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear - have been recontextualized into films like O and King of Texas, or television shows such as «The Gilmore Girls», «Cheers», and «Clueless». This book illustrates how Romeo and Juliet is the most shamelessly appropriated of Shakespeare's scripts for contemporary use because its plot fits so neatly into the teenage culture that has burgeoned since the late 1950s. Shakespeare Translated looks at what has happened to Shakespeare, for better or - more often - for worse, as the new millennium begins.