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.

_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>

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