Shakespeare and the English-speaking Cinema

by Jackson, Russell

• ISBN13: 9780199659463
• ISBN10: 019965946X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-12-09
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Russell Jackson, Allardyce Nicoll Professor of Drama, University of Birmingham

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 Noel Coward Theatre.