{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0158311345646438, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.746212121212121, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Studying Shakespeare on Film

Aimed at newcomers to the subject, this book is a guide for the analysis of Shakespeare on film. Starting with an introduction to the main challenge faced by any director — the early-modern language of the plays — there follows exemplars for examining how that challenge is met using as case studies twelve Shakespeare films, including Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. The reader is invited to explore different critical approaches such as how a director can tell the story of the play in a setting that embraces the expectations of realism in cinema, but still pays homage to the theatrical origins of the work. There is a discussion of those films in which the setting provides a visual analogy with the preoccupations of the story, but not at the expense of Shakespeare's language which is extended to show how some films use recent history as a setting, adding a further layer of meaning to the story from the cultural resonances associated with that historical past. These films also rely on an assumption that Shakespeare is so well-known as to form a distinctive, easily recognized brand in the cinema marketplace. Thus, his work can be reimagined in completely different genres such as the teenpic. In considering the latter films the reader will be invited to reflect upon wider issues relevant to the study of Shakespeare on film, principally how, and if, these adaptations of the plays can be recognised as part of the extended canon of Shakespeare in performance.