Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television

by James R. Keller (Editor), Leslie Stratyner (Editor)

Overview

In the past two decades, Othello has tried out for the basketball team, Macbeth has taken over a fast food joint and King Lear has moved to an Iowa farm--Shakespeare is everywhere in popular culture. This collection of essays addresses the use of Shakespearean narratives, themes, imagery and characterizations in non-Shakespearian cinema. The essays explore how Shakespeare and his work are manipulated within the popular media and explore topics such as racism, jealousy, misogyny and nationality.

The submissions concentrate on film and television programs that are adaptations of Shakespearean plays, including My Own Private Idaho, CSI-Miami, A Thousand Acres, Prospero's Books, O, 10 Things I Hate About You, Withnail and I, Get Over It, and The West Wing. Each chapter includes notes and a list of works cited. A full bibliography completes the work; it is divided into bibliographies and filmographies, general studies and essays, derivatives based on a single play, derivatives based on several, and derivatives based on Shakespeare as a character.

Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786419098
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	09/28/2004
Pages:	203
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.41(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

James R. Keller is a professor and chair of the English and Theatre department at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky. The author or editor of numerous works about popular culture, he lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Leslie Stratyner, a professor of English at Mississippi University for Women, lives in Columbus, Mississippi.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction     

1: The Politics of Culture: The Play’s the Thing     
2: Imitation as Originality in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho     
3: Shakespeare Transposed: The British Stage on the Post-Colonial Screen     
4: Suture, Shakespeare, and Race: Or, What Is Our Cultural Debt to the Bard?     
5: Cinema in the Round: Self-Reflexivity in Tim Blake Nelson’s O     
6: Sex, Lies, Videotape-and Othello     
7: “The Time Is Out of Joint”: Withnail and I and Historical Melancholia     
8: Horatio: The First CSI     
9: Teen Scenes: Recognizing Shakespeare in Teen Film     
10: “An Aweful Rule”: Safe Schools, Hard Canons, and Shakespeare’s Loose Heirs     
11: Prospero’s Pharmacy: Peter Greenaway and the Critics Play Shakespeare’s Mimetic Game     
12: Shakespeare Film and Television Derivatives: A Bibliography     

Contributors     
Index     

Editorial Reviews

well-documented...well-written...sensitive and insightful...helpful...recommended”—Choice.

From the Publisher

well-documented...well-written...sensitive and insightful...helpful...recommended

Choice