Out Now: Shakespeare Films: A Re-evaluation of 100 Years of Adaptations

We've been a bit remiss in covering Shakespeare on the site. Here is a recent book from McFarland.

Shakespeare Films: A Re-evaluation of 100 Years of Adaptations
https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/shakespeare-films/

Peter E.S. Babiak

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 212
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2016
pISBN: 978-1-4766-6254-1
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2352-8
Imprint: McFarland
$35.00


About the Book

This study reexamines the recognized “canon” of films based on Shakespeare’s plays, and argues that it should be broadened by breaking with two unnecessary standards: the characterization of the director as “auteur” of a play’s screen adaptation, and the convention of excluding films with contemporary language or modern or alternative settings or which use the play as a subtext. The emphasis is shifted from the director’s contribution to the film’s social, cultural and historical contexts. The work of the auteurs is reevaluated within present-day contexts, preserving the established canon while proposing new criteria for inclusion.


Table of Contents


Preface 1

Introduction 5

1. Silent Shakespeare 25

2. The Classical Hollywood Period to World War II 39

3. Olivier and Welles 56

4. Kurosawa 69

5. Kozintsev 84

6. Zeffirelli 99

7. Kott, Brook, Richardson and Polanski 114

8. The 1970s and 1980s 124

9. Branagh 136

10. Millennial Shakespeare 151

Conclusion 166

Chapter Notes 181

Works Cited 186

Index 198


Peter E.S. Babiak has taught composition, drama, film studies and literature at several institutions in Southern Ontario, Canada. He has contributed chapters to scholarly books, published several articles in CineAction Magazine, and been a regular presenter at the Annual Conference of the U.S. Popular Culture Association since 2004. He lives in Canada.

CFP Shakespeare and Digital Humanities (Spec Issue of Humanities) (proposals by 9/14/2018)

Of potential interest:

Special Issue "Shakespeare and Digital Humanities: New Perspectives and Future Directions"
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/18/special-issue-shakespeare-and-digital-humanities-new-perspectives-and-future

deadline for submissions:
January 28, 2019

full name / name of organization:
Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

contact email:
stephen.oneill@mu.ie


Shakespeare is now fundamentally digital. The technologies, resources and cultures of the digital age influence how we humans variously read, watch, research, and teach Shakespeare. This influence occurs in both apparent but also unseen ways since digital technologies include hidden processes, or non-human actors such as algorithms. In fact, the thing we call “Shakespeare” is the consequence of the interaction of agential humans and digital, non-human actors. The Special Issue of Humanities explores this technogenic dynamic and its significance for understandings of Shakespeare’s works and their cultural afterlives. It does so from a digital humanities perspective, with the aim of building on trends within Shakespeare studies towards the interrelation between Shakespeare’s works and a variety of contemporary technologies.

The Special Issue especially welcomes approaches that are trans-disciplinary.

• Papers are invited from an international community of researchers interested in critically examining how digital technologies have enhanced, transformed, or challenged the appreciation and study of Shakespeare. 
• Papers might address questions of methodology, and explore how digital humanities scholarship is applying technology and quantitative analyses to the corpus. What new insights into Shakespearean authorship, characterization, genre, and language, can computational analyses reveal? 
• Papers might map and critically evaluate the available digital resources for Shakespeare research and teaching, including searchable text online editions, databases, and podcasts. Or, they might critically analyse forms and practices in digital cultures, from fan or vernacular productions that reiterate Shakespearean stories and characters on such platforms as Twitter and YouTube, to digital art and curation, and online Shakespeare quotation generators. 
• In turn, papers might examine how Shakespeare theatre companies are using digital technologies both within the live performance itself, and also to create an online, commercial, and interactive presence for a production.

This Special Issue of Humanities offers an opportunity to examine the application of digital technologies to Shakespeare, in all its variety; to explore the implications of that interrelation; and, crucially, to consider what future directions scholarship and practices might take as the encounter with Shakespeare increasingly becomes digital.


Please submit 300 word proposals for original contributions and a 100-word biography (include selected publications) by 14 September 2018; email both the Guest Editor, as indicated above, and the journal (humanities@mdpi.com).

Deadline for completed papers, if selected (5000–7000 words): 28 January, 2019

Dr. Stephen O’Neill
Guest Editor


Further Information here:http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/Shakespeare

Kozintsev’s Shakespeare Films by Tiffany Ann Conroy Moore

Sorry to have missed this:

Kozintsev’s Shakespeare Films: Russian Political Protest in Hamlet and King Lear
https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/kozintsevs-shakespeare-films/
Tiffany Ann Conroy Moore
McFarland

Price: $40.00
Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-7135-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-0028-4
9 photos, notes, bibliography, index
202pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2012

Available for immediate shipment

About the Book

This book is a study of Grigory Kozintsev’s two cinematic Shakespeare adaptations, Hamlet (Gamlet, 1964), and King Lear (Korol Lir, 1970). The films are considered in relation to the historical, artistic and cultural contexts in which they appear, and in relation to the contributions of Dmitri Shostakovich, who wrote the films’ scores; and Boris Pasternak, whose translations Kozintsev used. The films are analyzed respective to their place in the translation and performance history of Hamlet and King Lear from their first appearances in Tsarist Russian arts and letters. In particular, this study is concerned with the ways in which these plays have been used as a means to critique the government and the country’s problems in an age in which official censorship was commonplace. Kozintsev’s films (as well as his theatrical productions of Hamlet and Lear) continue along this trajectory of protest by providing a vehicle for him and his collaborators to address the oppression, violence and corruption of Soviet society. It was just this sort of covert political protest that finally effected the dissolution and fall of the USSR.


Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Preface 1

Introduction 3

1. Kozintsev’s Contexts 1: Hamlet in Russia in the 18th and 19th Centuries 25

2. Kozintsev’s Contexts 2: Soviet Hamlets from the Revolution until after Stalin’s Death 52

3. Hamlet in the "Thaw" and Kozintsev’s 1964 Film Adaptation 74

4. Kozintsev’s Contexts 3: Russian and Soviet King Lears from the 18th Century through World War II 106

5. King Lear Revisited in the Brezhnev Era: Kozintsev’s 1970 Film Adaptation 136

Epilogue 179

Chapter Notes 182

Bibliography 185

Index 193


About the Author

Tiffany Ann Conroy Moore teaches writing, literature, film and public speaking at several colleges in Southern New Hampshire.

[link updated 25 June 2018]

Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture (New Book)

Out late last year from Palgrave Macmillan:

Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture
The New Middle Ages
Edited By Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline

Palgrave Macmillan, December 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-33734-3, ISBN10: 0-230-33734-1,
5.500 x 8.500 inches, 258 pages,
Hardcover $85.00

Drawing from an eclectic mix of scholars from the US, UK, and Australia,Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture examines the persistence of medieval themes, characters, and situations in a variety of media from reality television to Virginia Woolf, Arthurian film to Disney animation, Shrek to historical fantasy. Each essay demonstrates that the Middle Ages are not relegated to a static past but continue to fashion a vital presence in contemporary popular culture, changing our assumptions about the flow of history and the creation of the present.

 

Contents (from WorldCat):

 

The YouTube prioress : anti-semitism and twenty-first century participatory culture / Candace Barrington --
Animated conversations in Nottingham : Disney's Robin Hood (1973) / Andrew Lynch --
Virginia Woolf's middle ages / Steve Ellis --
Dario Fo's Mistero Buffo and the left-modernist reclamation of medieval popular culture / Louise D'Arcens --
Acephalic history : a Bataillian reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail / Daniel T. Kline --
Medievalism and periodization in Frozen river and The second shepherds' play : environment, class, miracle / Robert S. Sturges --
Time travel, pulp fictions, and changing attitudes toward the Middle Ages : why you can't get Renaissance on somebody's ass / Steve Guthrie --
H.P. Lovecraft's "unnamable" Middle Ages / Brantley L. Bryant --
Confession, contrition, and the rhetoric of tears : medievalism and reality television / Angela Jane Weisl --
Robin Hood, frenched / Richard Utz --
Brief encounters : Arthur's epic journey in Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur (2005) / Leslie Coote --
"My other world" : historical reflections and refractions in modern Arthurian fantasy / Philippa Semper --
Queer origins, deformed lies : seeding the future in Torchwood's "Children of earth" / Gail Ashton --
The medieval entertainment channel : the Shrek quartet / Kathleen Coyne Kelly.

About the editors:

Gail Ashton is an independent scholar and poet. She previously taught at the University of Manchester and the University of Birmingham and writes, edits, and reviews medieval and contemporary literature, especially Chaucer and poetry.

Daniel T. Kline is a professor and Chair of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He specializes in Middle English literature and culture, literary and cultural theory, and digital medievalism. He has published in Chaucer Review, College Literature, Comparative Drama, the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and Philological Quarterly, among others. 

 

 

Praise:

 

'Spanning many centuries and multiple media, this collection will inform and delight specialists, generalists, and anyone else interested in how we shape the Middle Ages and they shape us. Through highly engaging case-studies, the authors thoroughly and thoughtfully explore the vast and sometimes surprising legacy of our medieval past. They challenge the most fundamental assumptions of (neo)medievalism and open new avenues of research into one of the most dynamic and wide-ranging fields in the humanities.' - Karl Fugelso, professor of Art History at Towson University and editor of Studies in Medievalism
'An insightful collection that confronts issues too often left implicit in studies of medievalism head-on. Together the essays pose an important challenge: to examine the persistence, contingency and plurality of medievalism, and the implications that has for periodization and the ongoing influence of the medieval on the modern.' - David W. Marshall, California State University San Bernardino and editor of Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture

'The essays in Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture are energetic and spirited. They explore the diversity of medievalisms in popular culture, asking powerful questions about modern critical, creative, and political investments in such forms of medieval re-creation. Through a series of detailed readings, the authors offer loving, critical attention to texts that are often dismissed or unregarded. The best of these essays go even further: to consider the role of medievalism in shaping our ideas of modernity, and the relationship between high and popular culture. This collection is packed full of fresh insights and readings, and will become essential reading for students and researchers working in this field.' - Stephanie Trigg, University of Melbourne

 

 

 

Medieval and Renaissance Drama on Film NeMLA CFP

Filming this Insubstantial Pageant: Medieval and Renaissance Drama on Film (Abstracts due Sept. 30)
full name / name of organization:
Northeast Modern Language Association (conference Mar. 2013)
contact email:
jackiec159@hotmail.com

This panel seeks papers about film adaptations of medieval and Renaissance English drama, both in English-speaking countries and around the world. The NeMLA conference will be held in Boston in March, 2013. Papers might compare different adaptations of the same play, discuss problems associated with the notion of fidelity to text or of relocating a play in a different historical or cultural milieu, or consider the effectiveness for use in scholarly work or in the classroom. We seek investigation of continuities across disciplines: medieval/Renaissance, cinema studies/literature. What is at stake in these adaptations? What do these directors, writers, performers, and audiences bring to the table? This panel should appeal to those interested in film and literary adaptation, world cinema and transnational influences, issues of cultural hegemony and exchange, and Shakespeare on film. Abstracts (250 words) should be emailed in MS format to jackiec159@hotmail.comandmorsed@newschool.edu by Sept. 30.