Customer Reviews

Shakespeare, The Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV and Video

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A close look at its title will reveal the kind of cultural synthesis "Shakespeare: the Movie" aims at: it is a book of essays about movie and TV adaptations of plays written by Shakespeare. Seems like a fascinating subject - after all, there is a constant cross-fertilization between movies and plays: Dustin Hoffman in "Death of a Salesman," or "The Lion King, Broadway Musical." (Although, as one essay claims in passing, "The Lion King does have a distinct flavor of Hamlet.") And Shakespeare drew many of his plots from old folk tales - so you can toss oral tradition into the pot. What would it mean to write a review of one of these hybrids? How much importance must you place on faithfulness to the original, and how much on a successful adaptation to the new form? The set of questions suggested by those three words might be the most concise moment in the book. Because unfortunately, when I turned the page, I was faced with the most sour stew of turgid prose that academia can produce. Favorite words include "narration," "discourse", "cultural," "explicitly," and "contextualization," for these words can usually be added to any phrase you want, so the sentence can march down the margin until it's half a page long, while saying very little. Mobile phones and intercoms, writes Richard Burt, "formulate the mediating power of Los Angeles as the contemporary site where high/low distinctions are engaged in endlessly resignifying themselves." The word "gender" is frequently verbed... A couple of essays, like "Shakespeare Wallah," offered a genuinely new take (and fresh language), but on the whole the book was all over the place and lacked coherence.

This is a fantastic coleciton ranging across a wide variety of Shakespeare films. If you are dumb enough to think that "gender" is not a verb (as in "to gender") and a noun as well as think that "verb" is a verb and a noun (as in "to verb"), this book will probably disappoint you. But if you have a good sense of the grammar of the English language, you'll love this book.

THIS IS A LANDMARK COLLECTION OF BRILLIANTLY WRITTEN ESSAYS ON A VARIETY OF FILMED ADAPTATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, INCLUDING THE RECENT HENRY V AND RICHARD III. IT IS ALREADY A LANDMARK IN THE FIELD AND HAS BECOME THE MOST WIDELY CITED BOOK ON SHAKESPEARE AND FILM. I HAVE ASSIGNED FOR SEVERAL COLLEGE COURSES. STUDENTS HAVE FOUND IT AN INVALUABLE RESOURCE. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. READERS OF THIS BOOK WILL ALSO WANT TO HAVE A LOOK AT BURT'S EXCELLENT BOOK, UNSPEAKABLE SHAXXXSPEARES.