The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen provides a lively guide to film and television productions adapted from Shakespeare's plays. Offering an essential resource for students of Shakespeare, the companion considers topics such as the early history of Shakespeare films, the development of 'live' broadcasts from theatre to cinema, the influence of promotion and marketing, and the range of versions available in 'world cinema'. Chapters on the contexts, genres and critical issues of Shakespeare on screen offer a diverse range of close analyses, from 'Classical Hollywood' films to the BBC's Hollow Crown series. The companion also features sections on the work of individual directors Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Vishal Bhardwaj, and is supplemented by a guide to further reading and a filmography.

Introduction; Part I. Adaptation and its Contexts: 1. Shakespeare and the film industry of the pre-sound era Judith Buchanan; 2. Adaptation and the marketing of Shakespeare in classical Hollywood Deborah Cartmell; 3. Shakespeare 'live' Peter Holland; 4. Shakespearean cinemas/global directions Mark Thornton Burnett; Part II. Genres and Plays: 5. The comedies on screen Ramona Wray; 6. The environments of tragedy on screen: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth Peter Kirwan; 7. Two tragedies of love: Romeo and Juliet and Othello Victoria Bladen; 8. 'Sad stories of the death of kings': The Hollow Crown and the Shakespearean history play on screen Kinga Földváry; 9. The Roman plays on film Peter J. Smith; 10. Screening Shakespearean fantasy and romance in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest Antony Guy Patricia; Part III. Critical Issues: 11. Questions of racism: The Merchant of Venice and Othello Russell Jackson; 12. 'A wail in the silence': feminism, sexuality, and final meanings in King Lear films by Grigorii Kozintsev, Peter Brook, and Akira Kurosawa Courtney Lehmann; 13. Violence, tragic and comic, in Coriolanus and The Taming of the Shrew Patricia Lennox; Part IV. Directors: 14. The Shakespeare films of Orson Welles Emma Smith; 15. Kurosawa's Shakespeare: mute heavens, merging worlds, or the metaphors of cruelty Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède; 16. Zeffirelli's Shakespearean motion pictures: living monuments Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin; 17. Kenneth Branagh: mainstreaming Shakespeare in movie theatres Sarah Hatchuel; 18. Remaking Shakespeare in India: Vishal Bhardwaj's films Poonam Trivedi; Further reading; Filmography; Index.

Russell Jackson is Emeritus Professor of Drama in the University of Birmingham. He has published widely on Shakespeare, film and theatre and has worked as textual consultant for many film and theatre productions of Shakespeare's plays, including those directed by Kenneth Branagh and Michael Grandage. Among his most recent publications are Theatres on Film: How the Cinema Imagines the Stage (2013), Shakespeare and the English-Speaking Cinema (2014) and Shakespeare in the Theatre: Trevor Nunn (2018).