Shakespeare on Film

From the earliest days of the cinema to the present, Shakespeare has offered a tempting bank of source material than the film industry has been happy to plunder. Shakespeare on Film deftly examines an extensive range of films that have emerged from the curious union of an iconic dramatist with a medium of mass appeal.  The many films Buchanan studies are shown to be telling indicators of trends in Shakespearean performance interpretation, illuminating markers of developments in the film industry and culturally revealing about broader influences in the world beyond the movie theatre.

' How did Shakespeare make the movies? How did the movies make Shakespeare?  And how do the movies keep remaking him?Shakespeare on Film answers these questions. It looks at Shakespeare on the silent screen; in the art-house and the multiplex; from Asta Nielsen to Julie Taymor; in the hands of auteurs like Kurosawa, Jarman, Branagh; from mainstream to spin-off; from the centre of cultural production to the margins and back again. Buchanan's writing is smart and accessible, and her reading of individual films is technically sophisticated and brilliantly observed. This is a book both for students of Shakespeare and students of film.                                                      

              Professor Carol Chillington Rutter, University of Warwick