Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakespearean Screen Adaptations
From Kenneth Branagh’s groundbreaking Henry V to Justin Kurzel’s haunting Macbeth, many modern filmmakers have adapted Shakespeare for the big screen. Their translations of Renaissance plays to modern cinema both highlight and comment on contemporary culture and attitudes to art, identity, and the past. A dynamic analysis of twenty-seven films adapted from Shakespeare’s works, Philippa Sheppard’s Devouring Time addresses a wide range of topics, including gender, ritual, music, setting, rhetoric, and editing. She argues that the directors’ choice to adapt these four-hundred-year-old plays is an act of nostalgia, not only for the plays themselves, but also for the period in which they were written, the association of genius that accompanies them, and the medium of theatre. Sheppard contends that millennial anxiety brought on by the social and technological revolutions of the last five decades has generated a yearning for Shakespeare because he is an icon of a literary culture that is often deemed threatened. Authoritative and accessible, Devouring Time’s investigations of filmmakers’ nostalgia for the art of the past shed light on Western concepts of gender, identity, and colonialism.
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Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakespearean Screen Adaptations
From Kenneth Branagh’s groundbreaking Henry V to Justin Kurzel’s haunting Macbeth, many modern filmmakers have adapted Shakespeare for the big screen. Their translations of Renaissance plays to modern cinema both highlight and comment on contemporary culture and attitudes to art, identity, and the past. A dynamic analysis of twenty-seven films adapted from Shakespeare’s works, Philippa Sheppard’s Devouring Time addresses a wide range of topics, including gender, ritual, music, setting, rhetoric, and editing. She argues that the directors’ choice to adapt these four-hundred-year-old plays is an act of nostalgia, not only for the plays themselves, but also for the period in which they were written, the association of genius that accompanies them, and the medium of theatre. Sheppard contends that millennial anxiety brought on by the social and technological revolutions of the last five decades has generated a yearning for Shakespeare because he is an icon of a literary culture that is often deemed threatened. Authoritative and accessible, Devouring Time’s investigations of filmmakers’ nostalgia for the art of the past shed light on Western concepts of gender, identity, and colonialism.
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Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakespearean Screen Adaptations

Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakespearean Screen Adaptations

by Philippa Sheppard
Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakespearean Screen Adaptations

Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakespearean Screen Adaptations

by Philippa Sheppard

eBook

$34.95 

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Overview

From Kenneth Branagh’s groundbreaking Henry V to Justin Kurzel’s haunting Macbeth, many modern filmmakers have adapted Shakespeare for the big screen. Their translations of Renaissance plays to modern cinema both highlight and comment on contemporary culture and attitudes to art, identity, and the past. A dynamic analysis of twenty-seven films adapted from Shakespeare’s works, Philippa Sheppard’s Devouring Time addresses a wide range of topics, including gender, ritual, music, setting, rhetoric, and editing. She argues that the directors’ choice to adapt these four-hundred-year-old plays is an act of nostalgia, not only for the plays themselves, but also for the period in which they were written, the association of genius that accompanies them, and the medium of theatre. Sheppard contends that millennial anxiety brought on by the social and technological revolutions of the last five decades has generated a yearning for Shakespeare because he is an icon of a literary culture that is often deemed threatened. Authoritative and accessible, Devouring Time’s investigations of filmmakers’ nostalgia for the art of the past shed light on Western concepts of gender, identity, and colonialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780773550223
Publisher: McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date: 05/26/2017
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Philippa Sheppard teaches Renaissance and modern drama at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Remembrance of Things Past 3

Part 1 Defining Terms

1 Why Shakespeare Films Now? 31

2 The Drive to Realism in Shakespearean Adaptation to Film 57

Part 2 Remembering Origins

3 Shakespeare's Prologues on Page and Screen 103

4 Nostalgia for the Stage in Shakespearean Films 133

5 Death Rituals in Shakespeare, Almereyda, and Luhrmann 153

Part 3 Disguise, Genre, and Play

6 Gothic Aspects of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet 179

7 Art and the Grotesque in Julie Taymor's Titus and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books 198

8 Five English Screen Directors' Approaches to Cross-Dressing in As You Like It and Twelfth Night 223

9 Propaganda and the Other in Branagh's Henry V and Fiennes's Coriolanus 254

Part 4 Music and Memory

10 "Sigh No More Ladies": Shakespeare, Branagh, and Whedon Tackle Issues of Gender and Fidelity in Much Ado About Nothing 285

11 "O Mistress Mine": Intercutting in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night 303

12 Nostalgia in Hoffman's William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost 320

13 Ariel's Singing Body as Interpreted by Greenaway and Taymor 338

Conclusion 356

Works Cited 367

Index 409

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