Devouring Time

From Kenneth Branagh’s groundbreaking Henry V to Justin Kurzel’s haunting Macbeth, many modern filmmakers have adapted Shakespeare for the big screen. Their translations of Renaissance plays to modern cinema both highlight and comment on contemporary culture and attitudes to art, identity, and the past. A dynamic analysis of twenty-seven films adapted from Shakespeare’s works, Philippa Sheppard’s Devouring Time addresses a wide range of topics, including gender, ritual, music, setting, rhetoric, and editing. She argues that the directors’ choice to adapt these four-hundred-year-old plays is an act of nostalgia, not only for the plays themselves, but also for the period in which they were written, the association of genius that accompanies them, and the medium of theatre. Sheppard contends that millennial anxiety brought on by the social and technological revolutions of the last five decades has generated a yearning for Shakespeare because he is an icon of a literary culture that is often deemed threatened. Authoritative and accessible, Devouring Time’s investigations of filmmakers’ nostalgia for the art of the past shed light on Western concepts of gender, identity, and colonialism.

A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Sonnet 19 (Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws . . .)," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

Analyzes all of Shakespeare's sonnets in terms of their poetic structure, semantics, and use of sounds and images

This collection of insightful and provocative essays explores the theme of sanctuaries of light in nineteenth-century European literature, especially in selected works by William Wordsworth, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, and Charlotte Brontë. These sanctuaries of light, natural beauty, and serenity comfort, nurture, and revitalize the heart, mind, and soul of the individual and inspire creative expression. This book will be of interest to professors, teachers, and scholars in the fields of English literature, German literature, European literature, comparative literature, and cultural studies.