The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film
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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #8: Romeo and Juliet (1968)
#8: Romeo and Juliet (1968) Shakespeare in Love is a meta-narrative that simultaneously enacts Romeo and Juliet while imagining the story behind the play’s composition. So it’s about time I reviewed a straightforward Romeo and Juliet, so let’s talk about Franco Zeffirelli’s version from 1968. This is the only good cinematic R&J I know of, Continue reading
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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #7: Shakespeare in Love (1998)
#7: Shakespeare in Love (1998) Sooner or later, we had to talk about Shakespeare in Love. This is kind of the British version of a Hollywood-does-Shakespeare treatment. Joseph Fiennes, brother to Ralph Fiennes, plays Shakespeare. Rupert Everett plays the playright Philip Marlow. Judi Dench plays an imperious Queen Elizabeth. Simon Callow plays the Master of Continue reading
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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #6: The Fifteen Minute Hamlet (1995)
#6: The Fifteen Minute Hamlet (1995) Tom Stoppard turned Hamlet inside out in his Post-modernization of Shakespeare’s most famous play. The ways in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are more about us than about Shakespeare or the Elizabethans is mostly subtle, with the suggestion that modernity is an accident of human evolution, and that our fates, Continue reading
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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #5: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990)
#5: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990) Tom Stoppard is a great playwright, a British postmodernist who well knows how literary meaning is culturally constructed. His play and film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1990) are wonderful accomplishments that construe the comedy team of Hamlet’s bumbling college friends as the hapless heroes of the story, as if Continue reading
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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #4: Hamlet (1990)
#4: Hamlet (1990) Franco Zeffirelli is a creature of opera, and was friends with Maria Callas. He directed the version of La Traviata I attended at the Met. Yet when he directs films of Shakespeare, he avoids the bombast and hyperbole of the operatic mode altogether. His Hamlet is earthy. The problem with Hamlet, as Continue reading
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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #3: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999)
#3: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) Shakespeare’s language is sometimes poopooed by naïve readers as too old. I have, as a professor, been told good-naturedly by sniffing students that he wrote in Old English. In fact, Shakespeare is too new for the Middle English of Chaucer. His language is modern. His style, on the other Continue reading
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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #2: Titus (1999)
#2: Titus (1999) If a postmodern, ahistorical approach to Shakespeare repulsed me in the hands of Baz Luhrmann, that aesthetic charms the shit out of me in the hands of Julie Taymor in her adaptation of the brutal, early Shakespeare play, Titus Andronicus. For example, the campaigning of those who would be emperor of Rome, Continue reading
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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #1: Romeo + Juliet
#1: Romeo + Juliet (1996) It’s a forbidden secret that Shakespeare was a playwright. At least that’s the impression one can get from an American education, in which students are forced to read the plays without necessarily watching the plays. It would be like honoring the Cohen brothers by reading O Brother Where Art Thou Continue reading
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