Shakespeare Film and Media raises many questions for literary and media studies about adaptation, authorship, the status of “classic” texts and their variant forms, the role of Shakespeare in popular culture, the transition from manuscript, book, and stage to the modern medium of film and its recent digitally enhanced forms, and the implications of global production and distribution of Shakespeare on film in the digital age.
The viewing list (performance videos and films) is international and varies from term to term. Recent choices have included Kozintsev’s Hamlet and King Lear (Russia), Ryutopia Company’s Hamlet (Japan), Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Japan), Wu-Hsing-kuo’s Lear is Here (Taiwan), Nos de Morro Company’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (Brazil), Bardwaj’s Maqbool (India), Polanski’s Macbeth (US), Zeffirelli’s and Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet, Olivier and Branagh’s Henry V, Julie Taymor’s Titus, and Almereyda’s Hamlet.
For Hamlet this term, our explorations of Shakespeare across media, time and cultures will include work with several online collections of art and illustration, commentary notes and digital images of early printed texts.
