Description

Shakespeare can be seen as an exemplar of early modern literary synthesis, whose textual appropriations frequently define those sources for his audience, he is a progenitor of cinematic subjectivity. From Titus Andronicus and Hamlet to A Midsummer Night's Dream and Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare leads willing readers and forces the unwilling to rethink and re-see their world through his kaleidoscope of narrative and poetic sources. Filmmakers as diverse as Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa, Julie Taymor and Quentin Tarantino have tapped into the myriad possibilities his work engenders on the page and within the theatrical space.This study first considers Shakespeare's impact on our sensory experience of words and the images they conjure, then maps an interdisciplinary route toward deeper understandings of narrative cinema on Shakespearean terms.