English Drama - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Theater - History & Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, English Drama - 16th-17th Century - Elizabethan & Jacobean Eras - Shakespeare - Literary Criticism, Television Programs - General & Misc
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Overview
Watching Shakespeare on Television looks at Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon and at the videocassette as "text" - that is, as an object fixed in time as well as in its assumptions about its medium. Even films made to be shown at a cinema are also designed to become cassettes for the vast "secondary" market. H. R. Coursen's study of Shakespearean films and television productions includes such classics as Olivier's Hamlet and Brook's and Welles's King Lear, as well as more recent productions such as Kevin Kline's and Mel Gibson's Hamlets, Kenneth Branagh's Henvy V, and Peter Greenaway's version of The Tempest, Prospero's Books. Shakespeare's scripts are designed to be "open to interpretation." That openness is not the invention of disciples of Foucault or Derrida. The "meaning" of a Shakespeare script can never be fixed; rather, it is a temporal quality that shows how a script reflects, reinterprets, or reemphasizes the cultural and ideological assumptions of a particular moment in history. Shakespeare remains popular, as Branagh's Henry V, Zeffirelli's Hamlet, and a proliferation of Shakespeare's festivals prove. The energy known as Shakespeare cannot be isolated from the culture that constantly reappropriates the scripts and creates new audiences for them. Shakespeare "works" on television because television is a linguistic medium, and because we are becoming accustomed to the diminished scale of the television (and the videocassette), as opposed to the grander dimensions of cinema. Shakespeare survives domestication, but in ways that demand investigation about why and how the scripts can work on television, and about the nature of this medium when it is charged with Shakespearean energy. Watching Shakespeare on Television looks at Gertrude, a character often clear in performance even if "unwritten" in the script, and at Hamlet's disquisition to Yorick's skull, subject to a wide range of options and interpretations. Other subjects covered are "style" in A MBook Details
Published
January 31, 1994
Publisher
Rutherford [N.J.] : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; c1993.
Pages
198
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780838635216