Shakespeare's plays have long been open to reimagining and reinterpretation, from John Fletcher's riposte to The Taming of the Shrew in 1611 to present day spin-offs in a whole range of media, including YouTube videos and Manga comics. This book offers a clear route map through the world of adaptation, selecting examples from film, drama, prose fiction, ballet, the visual arts and poetry, and exploring their respective political and cultural interactions with Shakespeare's plays. 36 specific case studies are discussed, three for each of the 12 plays covered, offering additional guidance for readers new to this important area of Shakespeare studies. The introduction signals key adaptation issues that are subsequently explored through the chapters on individual plays, including Shakespeare's own adaptive art and its Renaissance context, production and performance as adaptation, and generic expectation and transmedial practice. Organized chronologically, the chapters cover the most commonly studied plays, allowing readers to dip in to read about specific plays or trace how technological developments have fundamentally changed ways in which Shakespeare is experienced. With examples encompassing British, North American, South and East Asian, European and Middle Eastern adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, the volume offers readers a wealth of insights drawn from different ages, territories and media.

Shakespeare's plays have long been open to reimagining and reinterpretation, from John Fletcher's riposte to The Taming of the Shrew in 1611 to present day spin-offs in a whole range of media, including YouTube videos and Manga comics. This book offers a clear route map through the world of adaptation, selecting examples from film, drama, prose fiction, ballet, the visual arts and poetry, and exploring their respective political and cultural interactions with Shakespeare's plays. 36 specific case studies are discussed, three for each of the 12 plays covered, offering additional guidance for readers new to this important area of Shakespeare studies. The introduction signals key adaptation issues that are subsequently explored through the chapters on individual plays, including Shakespeare's own adaptive art and its Renaissance context, production and performance as adaptation, and generic expectation and transmedial practice. Organized chronologically, the chapters cover the most commonly studied plays, allowing readers to dip in to read about specific plays or trace how technological developments have fundamentally changed ways in which Shakespeare is experienced. With examples encompassing British, North American, South and East Asian, European and Middle Eastern adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, the volume offers readers a wealth of insights drawn from different ages, territories and media.

A hands-on introductory guide to analyzing and discussing Shakespeare on screen. Part One establishes the differences between Shakespeare on stage and film, with Part Two providing a historical introduction to Shakespeare on film. Part Three explores the key modes and genre conventions used in Shakespeare on film and Part Four contains a series of critical essays, while Part Five discusses Shakespeare on TV. At every stage students are provided with critical knowledge and vocabulary to analyze Shakespeare on screen.

Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television examines recent film and television transformations of William Shakespeare's drama by focusing on the ways in which modern directors acknowledge and respond to the perceived authority of Shakespeare as author, text, cultural icon, theatrical tradition, and academic institution. This study explores two central questions. First, what efforts do directors make to justify their adaptations and assert an interpretive authority of their own? Second, how do those self-authorizing gestures impact upon the construction of gender, class, and ethnic identity within the filmed adaptations of Shakespeare's plays? The chosen films and television series considered take a wide range of approaches to the adaptative process - some faithfully preserve the words of Shakespeare; others jettison the Early Modern language in favor of contemporary idiom; some recreate the geographic and historical specificity of the original plays, and others transplant the plot to fresh settings. The wealth of extra-textual material now available with film and television distribution and the numerous website tie-ins and interviews offer the critic a mine of material for accessing the ways in which directors perceive the looming Shakespearean shadow and justify their projects. Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television places these directorial claims alongside the film and television plotting and aesthetic to investigate how such authorizing gestures shape the presentation of gender, class, and ethnicity.

Kidnie brings current debates in performance criticism in contact with recent developments in textual studies to explore what it is that distinguishes Shakespearean work from its apparent other, the adaptation.

As readers head into the second fifty years of the modern critical study of blackness and black characters in Renaissance drama, it has become a critical commonplace to note black female characters’ almost complete absence from Shakespeare’s plays. Despite this physical absence, however, they still play central symbolic roles in articulating definitions of love, beauty, chastity, femininity, and civic and social standing, invoked as the opposite and foil of women who are “fair”. Beginning from this recognition of black women’s simultaneous physical absence and imaginative presence, this book argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women’s often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a vital staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare’s world, and our own. Ranging geographically across North America and the Caribbean, and including film and fiction as well as drama as it discusses remade versions of Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World will attract scholars of early modern race studies, gender and performance, and women in Renaissance drama.

The relationship between modern drama and Shakespeare remains intense and fruitful, as Shakespearian themes continue to permeate contemporary plays, films, and other art-forms. Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama is the first book-length international study to examine the critical and theatrical connections among these fields, including the motivations, methods, and limits of adaptation in modern performance media. Top scholars including Peter Holland, Alexander Leggatt, Brian Parker, and Stanley Wells examine such topics as the relationship between Shakespeare and modern drama in the context of current literary theories and historical accounts of adaptive and appropriative practices. Among the diverse and intriguing examples studied are the authorial self-adaptations of Tom Stoppard and Tennessee Williams, and the generic and political appropriations of Shakespeare's texts in television, musical theatre, and memoir. This illuminating and theoretically astute tribute to Renaissance and modern drama scholar Jill Levenson will stimulate further research on the evolving adaptive and intertextual relationships between influential literary works and periods.

An introductory critical study for first year undergraduates which bridges the gap between A Level and university study. The book offers an accessible overview of key critical perspectives, early modern contexts, and methods of close reading, as well as screen and stage performances spanning several decades. Organised around the discussion of fourteen major plays, it introduces readers to the diverse theoretical approaches typical of today's English studies. This is a go-to resource that can be consulted thematically or by individual play or genre. Critical approaches can overwhelm students who are daunted by the quantity and complexity of current scholarship; Bickley and Stevens are experienced teachers at both A and university level and are thus uniquely qualified to show how a mix of critical ideas can be used to inform ways of thinking about a play.

A modern-day Taming of the Shrew that concludes at a high school prom. An agoraphobic Olivia from Twelfth Night sending video dispatches from her bedroom. A time-traveling teenager finding romance in the house of Capulet. Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies posits that Shakespeare in popular culture is increasingly becoming the domain of the adolescent girl, and engages the interdisciplinary field of Girls’ Studies to analyze adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare’s plays in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Through chapters on film, television, young adult fiction, and web series aimed at girl readers and audiences, this volume explores the impact of girl cultures and concerns on Shakespeare’s afterlife in popular culture and the classroom. Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies argues that girls hold a central place in Shakespearean adaptation, and that studying Shakespeare through the lens of contemporary girlhoods can generate new approaches to Renaissance literature as well as popular culture aimed at girls and young people of marginalized genders. Drawing on contemporary cultural discourses ranging from Abstinence-Only Sex Education and Shakespeare in the US Common Core to rape culture and coming out, this book addresses the overlap between Shakespeare’s timeless girl heroines and modern popular cultures that embrace figures like Juliet and Ophelia to understand and validate the experiences of girls. Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies theorizes Shakespeare’s past and present cultural authority as part of an intersectional approach to adaptation in popular culture.

Hamlet is the most often produced play in the western literary canon, and a fertile global source for film adaptation. Samuel Crowl, a noted scholar of Shakespeare on film, unpacks the process of adapting from text to screen through concentrating on two sharply contrasting film versions of Hamlet by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996). The films' socio-political contexts are explored, and the importance of their screenplay, film score, setting, cinematography and editing examined. Offering an analysis of two of the most important figures in the history of film adaptations of Shakespeare, this study seeks to understand a variety of cinematic approaches to translating Shakespeare's “words, words, words” into film's particular grammar and rhetoric