This book is the first edited collection to explore Shakespeare’s life as depicted on the modern stage and screen. Focusing on the years 1998-2023, it uniquely identifies a 25-year trend for depicting Shakespeare, his family and his social circle in theatre, film and television. Interrogating Shakespeare’s afterlife across stage and screen media, the volume explores continuities and changes in the form since the release of Shakespeare in Love, which it positions as the progenitor of recent Shakespearean biofictions in Anglo-American culture. It traces these developments through the 21st century, from pivotal moments such as the Shakespeare 400 celebrations in 2016, up to the quatercentenary of the publication of the First Folio, whose portrait helped make the author a globally recognisable icon. The collection takes account of recent Anglo-American socio-political, cultural and literary concerns including feminism, digital media and the biopic and superhero genres. The wide variety of works discussed range from All is True and Hamnet to Upstart Crow, Bill and even The Lego Movie. Offering insights from actors, dramatists and literary and performance scholars, it considers why artists are drawn to Shakespeare as a character and how theatre and screen media mediate his status as literary genius.

Shakespeare and Ireland examines the complex relationship between the most celebrated icon of the British establishment and Irish literary and cultural traditions. Addressing Shakespearean representations of Ireland as well as Irish writers' responses to the dramatist, it ranges widely across theatrical performances, pedagogical practices, editorial undertakings and political developments. The writings of Joyce, Heaney and Yeats are considered, in addition to recent nationalist discourses. In so doing, the collection establishes the multiple 'Shakespeares' and competing 'Irelands' that inform the Irish imagination.

Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture argues for the crucial place of the 'monster' in the early modern imagination. The author traces the metaphorical significance of 'monstrous' forms across a range of early modern exhibition spaces - fairground displays, 'cabinets of curiosity' and court entertainments - to contend that the 'monster' finds its most intriguing manifestation in the investments and practices of contemporary theater. The study's new readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson make a powerful case for the drama's contribution to debates about the 'extraordinary body'.

In this study, William C. Carroll analyses a wide range of adaptations and appropriations of Macbeth across different media to consider what it is about the play that compels our desire to reshape it. Arguing that many of these adaptations attempt to 'improve' or 'correct' the play's perceived political or aesthetic flaws, Carroll traces how Macbeth's popularity and adaptability stems from several of its formal features: its openly political nature; its inclusion of supernatural elements; its parable of the dangers of ambition; its violence; its brevity; and its domestic focus on a husband and wife. The study ranges across elite and popular culture divides: from Sir William Davenant's adaptation for the Restoration stage (1663-4), an early 18th-century novel, The Secret History of Mackbeth and Verdi's Macbeth, through to 20th- and 21st-century adaptations for stage and screen, as well as contemporary novelizations, young adult literature and commercial appropriations that testify to the play's absorption into contemporary culture.

This edited collection offers the first in-depth analysis and sourcebook for 'Lockdown Shakespeare'. It brings together scholars of stage, screen, early modern and adaptation studies to examine the work that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic and considers issues of form, liveness, reception, presence and community. Interviews with theatre makers and artists illuminate the challenges and benefits of creating new work online, while educators consider how digital tools have facilitated the teaching of Shakespeare through performance. Together, the chapters in this book offer readers the definitive work on the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare online during the pandemic. From The Show Must Go Online, which presented Shakespeare's First Folio via YouTube, to Creation Theatre and Big Telly's interactive The Tempest and Macbeth, which used Zoom as their stage, the book documents the variety and richness of work that emerged during the pandemic. It reveals how, by taking Shakespeare online in new and innovative ways, the theatre industry sparked the evolution of new forms of performance with their own conventions, aesthetics and notions of liveness. Among the other productions discussed are Arden Theatre Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Tender Claws' 'The Under Presents: Tempest', The Shakespeare Ensemble's What You Will, Merced Shakespearefest's Ricardo II, CtrlAltRepeat's Midsummer Night Stream, Sally McLean's Shakespeare Republic: #AllTheWebsAStage (The Lockdown Chronicles) and Justina Taft Mattos's Moore - A Pacific Island Othello.

Women and Indian Shakespeares explores the multiple ways in which women are, and have been, engaged with Shakespeare in India. Women's engagements encompass the full range of media, from translation to cinematic adaptation and from early colonial performance to contemporary theatrical experiment. Simultaneously, Women and Indian Shakespeares makes visible the ways in which women are figured in various representational registers as resistant agents, martial seductresses, redemptive daughters, victims of caste discrimination, conflicted spaces and global citizens. In so doing, the collection reorients existing lines of investigation, extends the disciplinary field, brings into visibility still occluded subjects and opens up radical readings. More broadly, the collection identifies how, in Indian Shakespeares on page, stage and screen, women increasingly possess the ability to shape alternative futures across patriarchal and societal barriers of race, caste, religion and class. In repeated iterations, the collection turns our attention to localized modes of adaptation that enable opportunities for women while celebrating Shakespeare's gendered interactions in India's rapidly changing, and increasingly globalized, cultural, economic and political environment. In the contributions, we see a transformed Shakespeare, a playwright who appears differently when seen through the gendered eyes of a new Indian, diasporic and global generation of critics, historians, archivists, practitioners and directors. Radically imagining Indian Shakespeares with women at the centre, Women and Indian Shakespeares interweaves history, regional geography/regionality, language and the present day to establish a record of women as creators and adapters of Shakespeare in Indian contexts.

'Hamlet' and World Cinema reveals a rich history of cinematic production extending across the globe. Making a case for Hamlet as the world's most frequently filmed text, and using specially commissioned interviews with cast, directors and screenwriters, it discusses films from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. The book argues that the play has been taken up by filmmakers world-wide to allegorise the energies, instabilities, traumas and expectations that have defined the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, it rejects the Anglophone focus which has dominated criticism up to now and explores instead the multiple constituencies that have claimed Shakespeare's most celebrated work as their own. 'Hamlet' and World Cinema uncovers a vital part of the adaptation story. This book facilitates a fresh understanding of Shakespeare's cinematic significance and newly highlights Hamlet's political and aesthetic instrumentality in a vast range of local and global contexts.

'Hamlet' and World Cinema reveals a rich history of cinematic production extending across the globe. Making a case for Hamlet as the world's most frequently filmed text, and using specially commissioned interviews with cast, directors and screenwriters, it discusses films from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. The book argues that the play has been taken up by filmmakers world-wide to allegorise the energies, instabilities, traumas and expectations that have defined the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, it rejects the Anglophone focus which has dominated criticism up to now and explores instead the multiple constituencies that have claimed Shakespeare's most celebrated work as their own. 'Hamlet' and World Cinema uncovers a vital part of the adaptation story. This book facilitates a fresh understanding of Shakespeare's cinematic significance and newly highlights Hamlet's political and aesthetic instrumentality in a vast range of local and global contexts.

Shakespeare and World Cinema radically re-imagines the field of Shakespeare on film, drawing on a wealth of examples from Africa, the Arctic, Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Tibet, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. Mark Thornton Burnett explores the contemporary significance of Shakespeare cinema outside the Hollywood mainstream for the first time, arguing that these adaptations are an essential part of the story of Shakespearean performance and reception. The book reveals in unique detail the scope, inventiveness and vitality of over seventy films that have undeservedly slipped beneath the radar of critical attention and also discusses regional Shakespeare cinema in Latin America and Asia. Utilising original interviews with filmmakers throughout, it introduces new auteurs, analyses multiple adaptations of plays such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet and pioneers fresh methodologies for understanding the role that Shakespeare continues to play in the international marketplace.

Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture argues for the crucial place of the 'monster' in the early modern imagination. Burnett traces the metaphorical significance of 'monstrous' forms across a range of early modern exhibition spaces - fairground displays, 'cabinets of curiosity' and court entertainments - to contend that the 'monster' finds its most intriguing manifestation in the investments and practices of contemporary theatre. The study's new readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson make a powerful case for the drama's contribution to debates about the 'extraordinary body'.

The essays in this volume read the Shakespeare films of the 1990s as key instruments with which western culture confronts the anxieties attendant upon the transition from one century to another. Such films as Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost, Othello, Shakespeare in Love and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet , the contributors maintain, engage with some of the most pressing concerns of the present, apocalyptic condition - familial crisis, social estrangement, urban blight, cultural hybridity, literary authority, the impact of technology and the end of history. The volume includes an exclusive interview with Kenneth Branagh.

Shakespeare and Ireland examines the complex relationship between the most celebrated icon of the British establishment and Irish literary and cultural traditions. Addressing Shakespearean representations of Ireland as well as Irish writers' responses to the dramatist, it ranges widely across theatrical performances, pedagogical practices, editorial undertakings and political developments. The writings of Joyce, Heaney and Yeats are considered, in addition to recent nationalist discourses. In so doing, the collection establishes the multiple 'Shakespeares' and competing 'Irelands' that inform the Irish imagination.

Shakespeare and World Cinema radically re-imagines the field of Shakespeare on film, drawing on a wealth of examples from Africa, the Arctic, Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Tibet, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. Mark Thornton Burnett explores the contemporary significance of Shakespeare cinema outside the Hollywood mainstream for the first time, arguing that these adaptations are an essential part of the story of Shakespearean performance and reception. The book reveals in unique detail the scope, inventiveness and vitality of over seventy films that have undeservedly slipped beneath the radar of critical attention and also discusses regional Shakespeare cinema in Latin America and Asia. Utilising original interviews with filmmakers throughout, it introduces new auteurs, analyses multiple adaptations of plays such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet and pioneers fresh methodologies for understanding the role that Shakespeare continues to play in the international marketplace.

Women and Indian Shakespeares explores the multiple ways in which women are, and have been, engaged with Shakespeare in India. Women’s engagements encompass the full range of media, from translation to cinematic adaptation and from early colonial performance to contemporary theatrical experiment. Simultaneously, Women and Indian Shakespeares makes visible the ways in which women are figured in various representational registers as resistant agents, martial seductresses, redemptive daughters, victims of caste discrimination, conflicted spaces and global citizens. In so doing, the collection reorients existing lines of investigation, extends the disciplinary field, brings into visibility still occluded subjects and opens up radical readings. More broadly, the collection identifies how, in Indian Shakespeares on page, stage and screen, women increasingly possess the ability to shape alternative futures across patriarchal and societal barriers of race, caste, religion and class. In repeated iterations, the collection turns our attention to localized modes of adaptation that enable opportunities for women while celebrating Shakespeare’s gendered interactions in India’s rapidly changing, and increasingly globalized, cultural, economic and political environment. In the contributions, we see a transformed Shakespeare, a playwright who appears differently when seen through the gendered eyes of a new Indian, diasporic and global generation of critics, historians, archivists, practitioners and directors. Radically imagining Indian Shakespeares with women at the centre, Women and Indian Shakespeares interweaves history, regional geography/regionality, language and the present day to establish a record of women as creators and adapters of Shakespeare in Indian contexts.

This edited collection offers the first in-depth analysis and sourcebook for ‘Lockdown Shakespeare’. It brings together scholars of stage, screen, early modern and adaptation studies to examine the work that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic and considers issues of form, liveness, reception, presence and community. Interviews with theatre makers and artists illuminate the challenges and benefits of creating new work online, while educators consider how digital tools have facilitated the teaching of Shakespeare through performance. Together, the chapters in this book offer readers the definitive work on the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare online during the pandemic. From The Show Must Go Online, which presented Shakespeare’s First Folio via YouTube, to Creation Theatre and Big Telly’s interactive The Tempest and Macbeth, which used Zoom as their stage, the book documents the variety and richness of work that emerged during the pandemic. It reveals how, by taking Shakespeare online in new and innovative ways, the theatre industry sparked the evolution of new forms of performance with their own conventions, aesthetics and notions of liveness. Among the other productions discussed are Arden Theatre Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tender Claws’ ‘The Under Presents: Tempest’, The Shakespeare Ensemble’s What You Will, Merced Shakespearefest’s Ricardo II, CtrlAltRepeat’s Midsummer Night Stream, Sally McLean’s Shakespeare Republic: #AllTheWebsAStage (The Lockdown Chronicles) and Justina Taft Mattos’s Moore – A Pacific Island Othello.

The last two decades have transformed the field of Renaissance studies, and Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader maps this difficult terrain. Attending to the breadth of fresh approaches, the volume offers a theoretical overview of current thinking about the period.
Collecting in one volume the classic and cutting-edge statements which define early modern scholarship as it is now practiced, this book is a one-stop indispensable resource for undergraduates and beginning postgraduates alike. Through a rich array of arguments by the world's leading experts, the Renaissance emerges wonderfully invigorated, while the suggestive shorter extracts, boxed questions and engaged editorial introductions give students the wherewithal and encouragement to do some reconceiving themselves.

A substantial reference work that supersedes existing studies, the Companion, explores the place of Shakespeare in relation to a wide range of artistic practices and activities, past and present. The 'arts' are defined broadly as cultural processes that take in publishing, exhibiting, performing, reconstructing and disseminating. The 30 newly commissioned chapters are divided into 6 sections: Shakespeare and the Book; Shakespeare and Music; Shakespeare on Stage and in Performance; Shakespeare and Youth Culture; Shakespeare, Visual and Material Culture; and Shakespeare, Media and Culture. Each chapter provides both a synthesis and a discussion of a topic, informed by current thinking and theoretical reflection. Key Features * Addresses Shakespeare in terms of a global frame of reference * Chapters consider chronology and overview, critical history and analysis * Responds to a growing critical and pedagogical interest in the relations between Shakespeare, the arts, film, performance and mass media more generally

This bold new collection offers an innovative discussion of Shakespeare on screen after the millennium. Cutting-edge, and fully up-to-date, it surveys the rich field of Bardic film representations, from Michael Almereyda's Hamlet to the BBC 'Shakespea(Re)-Told' season, from Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice to Peter Babakitis' Henry V. In addition to offering in-depth analyses of all the major productions, Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century includes reflections upon the less well-known filmic 'Shakespeares', which encompass cinema advertisements, appropriations, post-colonial reinventions and mass media citations, and which move across and between genres and mediums. Arguing that Shakespeare is a magnet for negotiations about style, value and literary authority, the essays contend that screen reinterpretations of England's most famous dramatist simultaneously address concerns centred upon nationality and ethnicity, gender and romance, and 'McDonaldisation' and the political process, thereby constituting an important intervention in the debates of the new century. As a result, through consideration of such offerings as the Derry Film Initiative Hamlet, the New Zealand The Maori Merchant of Venice and the television documentary In Search of Shakespeare, this collection is able to assess as never before the continuing relevance of Shakespeare in his local and global screen incarnations. Features * Only collection like it on the market, bringing the subject up to date. * Twenty-first century focus and international coverage. * Innovative discussion of a wide range of films and television. * Accessibly written for students and general readers.

In this study, William C. Carroll analyses a wide range of adaptations and appropriations of Macbeth across different media to consider what it is about the play that compels our desire to reshape it. Arguing that many of these adaptations attempt to ‘improve’ or ‘correct’ the play’s perceived political or aesthetic flaws, Carroll traces how Macbeth’s popularity and adaptability stems from several of its formal features: its openly political nature; its inclusion of supernatural elements; its parable of the dangers of ambition; its violence; its brevity; and its domestic focus on a husband and wife. The study ranges across elite and popular culture divides: from Sir William Davenant’s adaptation for the Restoration stage (1663–4), an early 18th-century novel, The Secret History of Mackbeth and Verdi's Macbeth, through to 20th- and 21st-century adaptations for stage and screen, as well as contemporary novelizations, young adult literature and commercial appropriations that testify to the play's absorption into contemporary culture.

In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of four major film directors to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Focusing on the work of Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Grigori Kozintsev and Franco Zeffirelli, each essay assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the film director covered and of the film director on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare.