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.

By connecting Shakespeare's language to the stunning artwork that depicted the end of the world, this study provides not only provides a new reading of Shakespeare but illustrates how apocalyptic art continues to influence popular culture today. Drawing on extant examples of medieval imagery, Roger Christofides uses poststructuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of how language works to shed new light on our understanding of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He then links Shakespeare's dependence on his audience to appreciate the allusions made to the religious paintings to the present day. For instance, popular television series like Battlestar Galactica, seminal horror movies such as An American Werewolf in London and Carrie and recent novels like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. All draw on imagery that can be traced directly back to the depictions of the Doom, an indication of the cultural power these vivid imaginings of the end of the world have in Shakespeare's day and now.

This book is a study of As You Like It , which shows how the play represents issues of interest to literate playgoers of its time, as well as speculatively to Shakespeare himself.

From canonical movies to web series, this volume illuminates myriad forms of Romeo and Juliet on screen around the world.

This remarkable collection of original essays by a distinguished group of American and English scholars explores attitudes toward apocalyptic thought and the Book of Revelation as they were reflected, over many centuries, in theological discourse, political activity, and artistic and literary endeavors.

An up-to-date survey of Shakespeare's King Lear on screen and the aesthetic, social and political issues raised by screen versions.

This study reexamines the recognized "canon" of films based on Shakespeare's plays, and argues that it should be broadened by breaking with two unnecessary standards: the characterization of the director as "auteur" of a play's screen adaptation, and the convention of excluding films with contemporary language or modern or alternative settings or which use the play as a subtext. The emphasis is shifted from the director's contribution to the film's social, cultural and historical contexts. The work of the auteurs is reevaluated within present-day contexts, preserving the established canon while proposing new criteria for inclusion.

Child characters feature more numerously and prominently in the Shakespearean canon than in that of any other early modern playwright. Focusing on stage and film productions from the past four decades, this study addresses how Shakespeare's child characters are reflected, refracted and reinterpreted in performance. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates close reading, semiotics, childhood studies, queer theory and performance studies, Gemma Miller explores how a close analysis of Shakespeare's child characters, both in the text and in performance, can reveal often uncomfortable truths about contemporary ideas of childhood, as well as offer fresh insights into the plays. Among the works and productions analysed are stage productions of Richard III by Sean Holmes and Thomas Ostermeier; Jamie Lloyd's and Michael Boyd's stage productions of Macbeth and the films of Roman Polanski and Justin Kurzel; Deborah Warner's stage production of Titus Andronicus and filmed adaptations by Jane Howell and Julie Taymor; and stage productions of The Winter's Tale by Nicholas Hytner, and by Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford, and the ballet adaptation by Christopher Wheeldon.

This book explores how Bakhtin’s ideas can illuminate the compelling but uneasy fusion of Shakespeare and cinema. With a wide variety of tones, languages, cultural orientations, and thematic concerns, film directors have updated, translated, transposed, fragmented, parodied, and geographically re-situated Shakespeare. Keith Harrison illustrates how Bakhtin’s interlinked writings in various fields can fruitfully be applied to an understanding of how the ongoing responsiveness of filmmakers to Shakespeare’s historically remote words can shape self-expressive acts of co-authoring in another medium. Through the use of such Bakhtinian concepts as the chronotope, heteroglossia, the carnivalesque, and polyphony, Harrison details how filmmakers—faithful to their specific cultures, genders, geographies, and historical moments—dialogically locate their particularity through Shakespeare’s presence.

Shakespeare has been a central figure in German literature and theatre. This book tells the story of Shakespeare in the German-speaking theatre against the background of German culture and politics in the twentieth century. It follows the earlier volume by Simon Williams on the reception of Shakespeare during the previous 300 years (Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586-1914). Hortmann concentrates on the two most important and fruitful periods: the years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and the turbulent decades of the sixties and seventies, when the German theatre was revitalised by a stormy marriage of avant-garde art and revolutionary politics. A section by Maik Hamburger covers developments in the theatres of the German Democratic Republic. Hortmann focuses on the most representative and colourful directors and actors, describing and illustrating individual productions as examples of particular trends or movements.