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.

Provides a comprehensive survey of approaches to genre in Shakespeare's work. Contributors probe deeply into genre theory and genre history by relating Renaissance conceptions. In this sense, the volume proposes to read Shakespeare through genre and, just as importantly, read genre through Shakespeare.

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.

Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. 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 instead 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. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting’s cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, 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.