Product Description

The prequel to Shakespeare, The Movie II, this classic collection of essays on adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV and video explores the impact of this popularization on the play's canonical status. Peter Donaldson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, Katherine Eggert, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, Robert Hapgood, University of New Hampshire, USA, IDonald H

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #229997 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
"[T]hese essays help us understand how Shakespeare continues to live in the twentieth century, and they do it in a manner incomparably more interesting than the articles in the popular media that appear with nauseating regularity and ubiquity at the release of every new adaptation. Hogdon's piece, like so many of the essays in this collection at their best, combines deftly detailed observation of the filmtexts and an abundance of research into contemporary mass and popular culture (audience responses, interviews, press clippings) with keen readings of the plays and sophisticated reflection on the rhetoric of political discourses. [S]ome of the contributions to the volume simply offer a variety of well-researched cultural histories and thoughtful close readings of the filmtexts from which one can learn a great deal."
-"Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England
"Lynda Boose and Richard Burt have collected quality essays that examine filmed Shakespeare from a variety of perspectives. Many of the essays do excellent work in viewing filmed Shakespeare within the context of Hollywood and/or international film, demonstrating how Hollywood colors Shakespeare and how Shakespeare colors Hollywood."
-"Popular Culture and American Culture Associations, 1998

From the Author
(Rave! ) reviews elsewhere
Our collection was reviewed last October in the London Observer, last November in the London Independent, and msot recently, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (January 16, 1998). These reviews were quite positive.

Customer Reviews

Interesting but flawed
A close look at it's title will reveal the kind of cultural synthesis "Shakespeare: the Movie" aims at: it is a book of essays about movie and TV adaptations of plays written by Shakespeare. I myself was much impressed, and before I even opened the book I mused for a moment on the implications of these layers of translation.After all, there is a constant cross-fertilization between movies and plays: Dustin Hoffman in "Death of a Salesman," or "The Lion King, Broadway Musical." (Although, as one essay claims in passing, "The Lion King does have a distinct flavor of Hamlet.) And Shakespeare drew many of his plots from old folk tales - so you can toss oral tradition into the pot. What would it mean to write a review of one of these hybrids? How much importance must you place on faithfulness to the original, and how much on a successful adaptation to the new form? The set of questions suggested by those three words might be the most concise moment in the book. Because unfortunately, when I turned the page, I was faced with the most sour stew of turgid prose that academia can produce. Favorite words include "narration," "discourse", "cultural," "explicitly," and "contextualization," for these words can usually be added to a phrase no matter it's subject, so the sentence can march down the margin until it's a third of a page long, while saying very little. Mobile phones and intercoms, writes Richard Burt, "formulate the mediating power of Los Angeles as the contemporary site where high/low distinctions are engaged in endlessly resignifying themselves." The word "gender" is frequently verbed. :) The Bard would wince. A couple of essays, like "Shakespeare Wallah," offered a genuinely new take (and fresh language), but on the whole the book was all over the place and lacked coherence. I was disappointed.