Shakespeare In Hollywood

Filmed Shakespeare criticism has largely centred on aesthetic critiques of filmic devices, or on comparisons between the film and the source text. Employing a new angle, this book explores the reasons why contemporary filmed Shakespeare prompts cultural anxiety about high-culture adaptation.

"It's 1934, and Shakespeare's most famous fairies, Oberon and Puck, have magically materialized on the Warner Bros. Hollywood set of Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Instantly smitten by the glitz and glamour of show biz, the two are ushered onto the silver screen to play (who else?) themselves. With a little help from a feisty flower, blonde bombshells, movie moguls, and arrogant "asses" are tossed into loopy love triangles, with raucous results. The mischievous magic of moviedom sparkles in this hilarious comic romp."--Publisher's website.

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace shows readers how ideas of Asia operate in Shakespeare performances and how Asian and Anglo-European forms of cultural production combine to transcend the mode of inquiry that focuses on fidelity. The result is a new creativity that finds expression in different cultural and virtual locations, including recent films and massively multiplayer online games such as Arden: The World of Shakespeare. The papers in this volume provide a background for these modern developments showing the history of how Shakespeare became a signifier against which Asian and Western cultures definedand continue to definethemselves. Hollywood films, and a century of Asian readings of plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth, are now conjoining in cyberspace making a world of difference in how we experience Shakespeare. The papers, written by experts in the field, provide an introduction to the diverse incarnations and bold sequences of screen and stage that in recent decades have produced new versions of Shakespeare's great comedies and tragedies and new ways of experiencing them. Authors, in the first part of the collection, examine body politics and race in Hollywood Shakespearean films andfilm techniques. It complements the second part of the book, in which the history of Shakespearean readings and stagings in China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, Malaya, Korea, and Hong Kong are discussed. Papers in the third part of the volume contain analyses of the transformation of the idea of Shakespeare in cyberspace, a rapidly expanding world of new rewritings of both Shakespeare and Asia. Together, the three sections of this comparative study show how Asian cultures and Shakespeare affect each other, how one culture is translated to anoth

This book states that, after Cavell's celebrated reading of 'King Lear' turned into a nightmarish meditation on Vietnam, he found a more audible voice. Here, the poetry of ideas and presence of mind that animate Cavell's writing receive readings attuned to the spirit of their composition and its enlivening powers.

Set in 1930, a world-renowned Italian tenor arrives to perform Othello but is too indisposed to go on.

Lively and up-to-date critical introductions to a rich range of Shakespeare adaptations for film, video and television.

Typescript, dated Jan. 16, 1996. Heavily marked with colored ink and highlighter by the videographer. Used by The New York Public Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Archive on Feb. 21, 1996, when videotaping the stage production at the Martin Beck Theatre, New York, N.Y. The production opened on Oct. 1, 1995, and was directed by Tom Moore. It starred Carol Burnett, Philip Bosco, and Jane Connell.