The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 25.035 Wednesday, 15 January 2014
From: Steve Roth <
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from someone trying to make a piece of theatre from a work of fiction would be like requiring Shakespeare to stick to historical documents.”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