Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television

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.

• Up-to-date coverage, including the latest Much Ado about Nothing by Branagh • Flexible arrangement of essays allows reader to home in on an individual film, or Shakespearean play, or director • 22 pictures from the whole range of films

1. Shakespeare on film and television: a retrospect Anthony Davies; 2. Shakespeare on the screen: a selective filmography Graham Holderness and Christopher McCullough; 3. Two-dimensional Shakespeare: King Lear on film Peter Holland; 4. Verbal-visual, verbal-pictorial or textual-televisual? Reflections on the BBC Shakespeare series Michele Willems; 5. Two types of television Shakespeare Neil Taylor; 6. Shakespeare’s comedies on film Russell Jackson; 7. The English history play on screen Michael Manheim; 8. A world elsewhere: the Roman plays on film and television Samuel Crowl; 9. Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare Ace G. Pilkinton; 10. The films of Hamlet Neil Taylor; 11. Filming Othello Anthony Davies; 12. Representing King Lear on screen: from metatheatre to `metacinema’ Kenneth S. Rothwell; 13. Kurosawa’s Shakespeare films: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, and Ran Robert Hapgood; 14. Macbeth on film: politics E. Pearlman.