The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 25.035  Wednesday, 15 January 2014

 

From:        Steve Roth <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         January 14, 2014 at 2:26:57 PM EST

Subject:    Stage Versions of Hilary Mantel’s Great Tudor Novels

 

“To demand complete fidelity from someone trying to make a piece of theatre from a work of fiction would be like requiring Shakespeare to stick to historical documents.”

 

Something of an aside: 

 

Susannah Clapp, like many reviewers of novel adaptations, misses rather the crux: stage plays and movies are shorter (much shorter) than novels. A couple of hours versus a dozen or dozens.

 

This is why movies are almost without exception not as good as the books they’re adapted from. (My favorite exception: Cuckoo’s Nest.)

 

Hewing back to our subject: I find Shakespeare remarkable not (just) because staged versions of the plays defy these generalities, but because his written scripts (only a couple of hours reading) do.

 

See:

 

Lukas Erne

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

 

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