Watching Shakespeare on Television looks at Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon and at the videocassette as "text" - that is, as an object fixed in time as well as in its assumptions about its medium. Even films made to be shown at a cinema are also designed to become cassettes for the vast "secondary" market. H. R. Coursen's study of Shakespearean films and television productions includes such classics as Olivier's Hamlet and Brook's and Welles's King Lear, as well as more recent productions such as Kevin Kline's and Mel Gibson's Hamlets, Kenneth Branagh's Henvy V, and Peter Greenaway's version of The Tempest, Prospero's Books. Shakespeare's scripts are designed to be "open to interpretation." That openness is not the invention of disciples of Foucault or Derrida. The "meaning" of a Shakespeare script can never be fixed; rather, it is a temporal quality that shows how a script reflects, reinterprets, or reemphasizes the cultural and ideological assumptions of a particular moment in history. Shakespeare remains popular, as Branagh's Henry V, Zeffirelli's Hamlet, and a proliferation of Shakespeare's festivals prove. The energy known as Shakespeare cannot be isolated from the culture that constantly reappropriates the scripts and creates new audiences for them. Shakespeare "works" on television because television is a linguistic medium, and because we are becoming accustomed to the diminished scale of the television (and the videocassette), as opposed to the grander dimensions of cinema. Shakespeare survives domestication, but in ways that demand investigation about why and how the scripts can work on television, and about the nature of this medium when it is charged with Shakespearean energy. Watching Shakespeare on Television looks at Gertrude, a character often clear in performance even if "unwritten" in the script, and at Hamlet's disquisition to Yorick's skull, subject to a wide range of options and interpretations. Other subjects covered are "style" in A Midsummer Night's Dream, particularly the 1982 ART production; the advantages film has over studio productions; and editing scripts for television, with a focus on the Nunn Othello and the Kline Hamlet. In the latter production, long takes contrast with the quicksilver montage technique of Zeffirelli's film version. Another chapter examines Othello as a script demanding a black actor in the lead, and it looks at the Nunn and Suzman versions as cases in point. Closure in Hamlet is analyzed as well: television, the modern medium of political closure, tends to include Fortinbras, as opposed to film which usually excludes him. Another chapter evaluates Prospero's Books, where the importation of television to film tends to erase film's field of depth and results in no improvement, regardless of the trumpeted "technological breakthrough" of high-definition television. Finally, the book peers into the future of Shakespeare's moving image, with attention paid to Peter Donaldson's Interactive Archive at M.I.T.

The Two Noble Kinsmen is Shakespeare’s final play written before his death in 1616. He collaborated on it with John Fletcher; later, Fletcher took over as playwright for the King’s Men. The plot derives from “The Knight’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Thebes and Athens are at war. The tyrant Creon of Thebes commands Arcite and Palamon to fight for him. After a battle against Theseus, they end up captured and imprisoned. From their cell window, they see a beautiful woman named Emilia. Arcite and Palamon’s friendship turns into rivalry when they challenge each other to a fight to the death—with the victor claiming Emilia. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the 1894 Royal Shakespeare edition. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

An anthology of essays and reviews. Cloth announced at $28.

Love's Labour's Lost is a wonderful comedy written by a genius English poet and playwright William Shakespeare. The heroes’ prototypes of the play are Shakespeare’s contemporaries: French King Henry of Navarre who ascended the throne named as Henry IV (known in a play as Ferdinand), his first wife Marguerite de Valois, and his closest companions by their own names Marshal Biron, Duke Longueville and Duke Dumaine. It is believed that Shakespeare used a historical fact as a plot for this play – the meeting of Catherine de Medicis and the King Henry of Navarre which aimed to resolve some political issues. The playwright applied his fantasy which added intrigue and humour to this fact.

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.

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.