| Shakespeare on Film Text Books |
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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 21.0127 Thursday, 18 March 2010
[1] From: Allston James <
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[2] From: Andrew Fleck <
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[3] From: Maurizio Calbi <
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[4] From: Tom Cartelli <
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[1]----------------------------------------------------------------- I wish to comment briefly on Patty Winter's post. The course she mentions is one that I teach on-line through Monterey Peninsula College. ENGLISH 16 Shakespeare Visions: Film & Text is 100% on-line and will be offered again in Fall 2010. Registration opens in a few weeks for the Fall section (www.mpc.edu). You may visit the course site at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Yes, we did use Dr. David Bevington's text and as a teacher, I can say I found his book provided just the right context, one that included a balanced examination of text and film, with some energy devoted to live performance. In short, while students viewed comparative scenes from, say, four Macbeths, they never lose sight of the text and its primacy.
Allston James
[2]------------------------------------------------------------- I wanted to thank the members of our list for so many great suggestions, both to the public list and directly to me. I'll be sure to follow up on these as I put the course together. It looks as if I'll get a chance to refine the course I teach this summer--I'm now scheduled to teach it again in the autumn term! Please feel free to send additional suggestions to me directly ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) so as not to overwhelm the list. I won't have to make my final book decisions for a few more weeks, I think, so I welcome additional recommendations.
With gratitude,
[3]------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Andrew Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe's New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (Polity, 2007) would be perfect for the course you have in mind. Maurizio Calbi
[4]------------------------------------------------------------- This is in reply to the Film textbook thread, specifically yesterday's The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 21.0120 Tuesday, 16 March 2010: I'd rather do my self-promoting off the SHAKSPER line, but have sufficient faith in the usefulness of this text to suggest NEW WAVE SHAKESPEARE ON SCREEN by Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007. The book is designed for classroom use, has a helpful historical introduction (focused mainly on last 20 yrs) as well as a secondary introduction to terms used and theoretical underpinnings, along with individual chapters on a number of "preferred" Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, and Titus films, as well as brief looks at quite a few others, including Tempest (Prospero's Bks), Luhrmann's R & J, and Richard III (Pacino, Loncraine). One caution: we're pretty clearly the "anti-Branagh" book so you'll get very slim bits of fairly dismissive commentary on his work, and, if I recall, we say little to nothing about Henry V. By the same token, we make a strong argument for a counter-tradition of Shakespeare on film (that is, counter to the Olivier/Branagh Anglocentric stage-centered line) that owes as much to European art-film directors as it does to Welles, Kurosawa, Polanski, Jarman, and Peter Brook. I'd also recommend ordering or using excerpts from the recent SQ volume devoted to Shakespeare on film, selections from recent Shakespeare Survey "aftermath" volumes, and any and all articles by Peter Donaldson ("il miglior fabbro") and Richard Burt, most of which are referenced in our bibliog. Newcomers to the field would also greatly profit from Burt and Boose's Shakespeare the Movie II. Though not quite built in the textbook mode, like the SQ collection it's close enough for selective predation. Of course, all recent work by Henderson, Lanier, Lehmann, Osborne, Starks, and Huang, among others, reproduced in these and their own freestanding texts should also be consulted. Lehmann's recent work and Huang's Chinese Shakespeares should prove particularly eye-opening. In short, this is a REAL FIELD, getting deeper and more interesting by the moment and worth getting immersed in. We're way past the time when Shakespeare films were mainly used for purposes of illustration.
Best wishes,
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