The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0952 Sunday, 29 October 2006
From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, October 29, 2006
Subject: Film/TV Course and DVD Wish List
In this upcoming spring semester, I will be offering a graduate seminar
"Shakespeare in Performance on Film and Television" (a course that in
many ways will be a culmination of thirty years of my teaching and
scholarship). If anyone in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area would be
interested in further details, please contact me by e-mail, and I will
be glad to provide them.
The course will be presented in a smart classroom environment and will
be directed to a non-specialist audience. Beyond reading, viewing, and
participating in class, enrollees will be required to write three
performance evaluations of Shakespeare plays realized for presentation
in the cinema or on television. Adaptations (such as SHE'S THE MAN, 10
THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU, KISS ME KATE, WEST SIDE STORY, O, FORBIDDEN
PLANET, A THOUSAND ACRES, and so on) will also be considered.
Using a variety of Information Technology applications (including
PowerPoint presentations that I have developed and refined over the past
ten plus years), I will begin by establishing a foundation in
Shakespeare's life, times, works, language, theater (including the
development of drama and an introduction to the Elizabethan-Jacobean
stage as a performance space), background of ideas (including the
dominant ideology of the times and the cultural context), as well as an
introduction to the transmission of the texts (including printing house
practices and an overview of current principles of editing Shakespeare's
texts).
After establishing this foundation in Shakespeare studies, we will
explore the nature and principles of performance criticism: This section
will include instruction in evaluating performance, in viewing
performances as interpretations of texts, in considerations of design
and blocking, and in reading scripts as actors and directors do. After
this, we will study how Shakespeare's texts through the language provide
embedded stage direction and clues regarding how to deliver and stage
those texts. The remaining background unit will address how cinematic
media communicate by providing an introduction to cinematic language.
This foundation in Shakespeare studies, performance criticism, media
analysis, and cinematic language is designed to enable participants to
analyze and critique Shakespearean realizations of plays and to a lesser
extent adaptations, from silent films to current offerings in the cinema
and on television. The major focus of the course will be on the study of
at least ten Shakespeare scripts as realized in various cinematic
performances. To enable our study, I will be making my own Shakespeare
on DVD collection (which is now approaching 200 titles when adaptations
are included) available to the participants in the class.
MY DVD WISH LIST: On a related subject, I have a strong preference for
using DVDs in the classroom. Over the years, with my own collection, I
make it a habit to purchase titles in DVD that I already own in VHS as
soon as they are released in the DVD format. For pedagogical use, I have
been able to convert some of my VHS tapes to DVD for classroom use until
I can replace them when the title is commercially available on DVD. I am
currently on the waiting list for the DVD release of Branagh's HAMLET,
but there are many more titles that I would like to see made available
on DVD. Here is my current wish list:
Branagh HAMLET
Welles CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (FALSTAFF)
Gade HAMLET, THE DRAMA OF VENGEANCE (Asta Nielsen)
Richardson HAMLET (Nichol Williamson)
Welles MACBETH
Reinhardt and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
Dieterle
Miller THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (Laurence Olivier)
Brook KING LEAR (Scofield)
Greenaway PROSPERO'S BOOKS
Mazursky TEMPEST (Cassavetes, Raul Julia)
Burge OTHELLO (Olivier)
Schaefer MACBETH (Evans, Anderson) (Both 1954 and 1960)*
*Actually, I would welcome having all eight of the Hallmark Shakespeare
productions available. My first encounters with Shakespeare as a
suburban Baltimore baby-boomer were Sunday afternoon television
broadcasts of the 1954 Hallmark Macbeth and the 1956 NBC Olivier Richard
III. By 1960, my family had a color TV set, so I was able to see 1960
Hallmark Macbeth remake in color.
To close my wish list, in the late 1980s a documentary was released on
Japanese television about Tadashi Suzuki that included a television
realization of his 1988 THE TALE OF LEAR with Tom Hewitt and Jeffrey
Bihr that I saw in Washington, D.C., at the Arena Stage as part of a
regional theater tour
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,967271,00.html). The
production was a stunning take on the play that deserves to be
recognized for the remarkable achievement that it is. Thus, to conclude,
I would love to see THE TALE OF LEAR, which is not even mentioned in Ken
Rothwell's A HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE ON THE SCREEN, released in DVD.
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