Abstract
In this chapter, I consider the interpretive pitfalls and profits of reading Shakespeare through contemporary American movies that do not refer directly or even indirectly to Shakespeare. I call such films “non-adaptations,” and the most celebrated film that belongs in this category is Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), a modern vision of Hamlet. With its terrifying ghostly father, monstrous son, and tragic self-damnation through criminality, the movie perfectly embodies Shakespearean plot arc and subtexts. I conclude the introduction with a brief meditation on the film work of Stanley Cavell, who first wrote about the Shakespearean non-adaptation. Cavell’s readings are powerful and problematic, and I address some of the complications of attempting this kind of interpretation.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
—Emily Dickinson
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I do not intend here to designate these works as failed, insufficient, or “Almost Shakespeare,” the title of a collection of essays assessing the texts as variously derivatives of the archetype, the unapproachable body of the king. While several essays in the collection touch on the transformative nature of the kind of reading I perform in this book, many more fall into the undifferentiated group of the adaptation study, the only difference from traditional versions of such studies being that the “adaptation” might take a slightly unusual form (e.g., a television episode in a long-running series). Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television, eds. James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner (North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 2004).
- 2.
As Tony Howard calls them: “Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots,” in Russell Jackson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 295–313. Howard describes a range of well-known and acknowledged adaptations, from A Thousand Acres, for instance, which “insists on the disturbing psychological implications of the [King Lear] myth itself” (300) to more suppositional remakings, requiring the interpretive leap I make here. Howard mentions The Godfather trilogy, but after claiming that Coppola’s relation to Shakespeare in the Godfather films is “probably accidental,” he discusses the final movie in the series, which supposedly the director tried to dignify “by copying King Lear” (299). Robert F. Willson, in a book published the same year as Howard’s essay, also called such works “offshoots”: see Shakespeare in Hollywood, 1929–1956 (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP/Associated University Presses, 2000), chapter 4. Both designations are indebted to Ruby Cohn’s excellent early commentary on Shakespeare in different forms, prose, poetical, and theatrical: Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976).
- 3.
The category of “analogy” for a type of adaptation, distant and independent from the source text, was coined in 1975 by Geoffrey Wagner, who calls it “a fairly considerable departure for the sake of making another work of art.” Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1975), 227; quoted in Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to Passion of the Christ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), 93.
- 4.
Thomas Cartelli named such renditions “slant” productions before I did; see his “Doing it Slant: Reconceiving Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath,” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 26–36.
- 5.
Conversation with Prof. Zachary R. Hines, April 5, 2019, at the University of Texas at Austin. For a related query with a narrow range of answers, see James M. Welsh, “What is a ‘Shakespeare Film,’ Anyway?,” in James M. Welsh and Peter Lev, eds., The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press), 105–114.
- 6.
“Introduction,” in Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey, eds., Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (NY: Palgrave, 2017), 2.
- 7.
In a post of April 11, 2014, Stephen Follows indicates:Verse
Verse “There are 525 films which give Shakespeare some sort of writing credit Of those, 294 are full adaptations of Shakespeare plays Hamlet is the most often adapted Shakespeare play Over half of all Shakespeare feature film adaptations are based on Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth or Othello.”
At https://stephenfollows.com/movies-based-on-shakespeare-plays/ - 8.
For a detailed history and analysis of the variant versions, see Zachary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2015).
- 9.
For most of the important sources, see Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 82–122. An account of Hamlet’s critique of humanism is available in Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017).
- 10.
Graham Holderness, “Textual Shakespeare,” in Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier and Jorg Helbig, eds., Sh@kespeare in the Media: From the Globe Theatre to the World Wide Web, 2nd Edn. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010), 55–71; pp. 70–71.
- 11.
Shakespeare’s practice as an adapter is frequently mentioned by people who write about the playwright and adaptation; see Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2016), 58–59; and Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 34.
- 12.
Thomas Leitch, “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,” Criticism 45.2 (2003): 149–71; p. 164.
- 13.
Patrick Cattrysse, Descriptive Adaptation Studies: Epistemological and Methodological Issues (Antwerp: Garant, 2014), 120.
- 14.
The relationship of film to play has also been noticed in a short, perceptive post by Eric Minton, “Birdman and Shakespeare: A Life of Delusions Takes Flight.” At http://www.shakespeareances.com/dialogues/commentary/Birdman_Shakespeareances-150219.html; Feb. 20, 2015.
- 15.
The image appears at the 2-hour, 39-minute mark in the film; I shall cite such further time signatures in the text as (2:39:00). I was first informed about the presence of the image by students in a film and Shakespeare class I was teaching in the Spring semester of 2004. I thank them for their contribution.
- 16.
Cited at http://www.jgeoff.com/godfather/ghostly_image.html. The question about the image was posed by Roger Ebert on 12/2/01.
- 17.
At http://imdb.com/title/tt0068646/goofs, under “Crew or equipment visible.” The idea that the Ghost’s infiltration escapes artistic intent sorts with my contentions about the presence of unacknowledged Shakespeare in the movies.
- 18.
For Hamlet, and other Shakespeare plays unless otherwise noted, I use the text of The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn., ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
In the final scene of Puzo’s novel, Clemenza, the newly promoted caporegime, calls Michael “Don Michael” (438). Coppola, however, has a more perfect idea of the patriarchal replacement. In the film, Clemenza says, after kissing Michael’s ring: “Don Corleone” (2:52:15).
- 19.
The exception, and it is significant, comes in Hamlet’s apparent inability to control himself around women: his equanimity is always threatened more severely in Gertrude’s or Ophelia’s company than in the King’s. Michael’s reactions to women are, by contrast, less pathological, more fully stereotypical: patronizing, untrusting, deceptive, emotionally shielded. Not that that isn’t pathological.
- 20.
This dazzling sequence, which so memorably entwines violence and the sacred, is well explicated in Bruce Kawin, How Movies Work (Berkeley, Calif., U of California P, 1992), 275–85.
- 21.
I explain some of Hamlet’s similarities to his father, or at least his father’s corrupt spirit, in Chap. 2. It must be noted that, in contradistinction to Hamlet, Michael’s murders are all strategic and purposive—at least until the second part of the saga.
- 22.
These two types resonate in that the savagery required to scatter chaos also empties the world of enemies, thus affording an orderly resolution for the hero. Even the wild avenger responds initially to the demands of reciprocity, a shaped or formal procedure, although his bloodlust may be entropy disguised as justice.
- 23.
The sacrality of the murders is also suggested by Carlos Clarens, “All in the Family: The Godfather Saga,” in Alain Silver and James Ursini, Gangster Film Reader (Pompton Plains, N.J., Limelight Editions, 2007), 107–115; p. 114.
- 24.
Examples of the former and latter, respectively, are David Sundelson, Shakespeare’s Restorations of the Father (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1983), and Xenia Georgopoulou, The body as text in Shakespeare’s plays: the fashioning of the sexes (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen P, 2011).
- 25.
In Puzo, we are treated to a third-person interior monologue from Woltz after he finds the horse’s head, and considers the character of a man like Corleone who “could destroy an animal worth six hundred thousand dollars.” Woltz thinks the act “implied a man who considered himself completely his own law, even his own God. And a man who backed up this kind of will with the power and cunning that held his own stable security force of no account…” This passage, in considering motive and method, undermines the divinity that shapes such ends. Mario Puzo, The Godfather (New York: G.B. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), 67–68. My thanks to Ulrike Mack for obtaining this quotation.
Other indicators of the Don’s divine status take the form of cruder symbology, such as the five wounds he survives when Virgil Sollozzo orders him killed, and his general triumph over religious infidels. These include Sollozzo, known as “the Turk” (who would import and spread the evils of drugs into America) and Woltz, the Jewish Hollywood mogul (who owns that Arabian stallion named Khartoum and answers to several filthy anti-Semitic stereotypes). The Godfather stands as the Christian redoubt against a cultural and capitalistic horde of vile unbelievers.
- 26.
For a psychologically influenced reading of the mythic backgrounds of the play, including the Orestes myth, see Theodore Lidz, Hamlet’s Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1975). Lidz argues that Hamlet includes aspects of both Oedipus and Orestes, or (very roughly) the patricidal and matricidal self; see 173–187. He writes, understatedly: “Shakespeare…stood at a point in civilization when vengeance ceased to impress him as an essential component of heroism” (179).
- 27.
Puzo makes the spiritual point in his novel’s closing words: “Then, with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone” (446).
- 28.
Michael’s murder of his brother-in-law, though it avenges Sonny’s death, brings him more nearly within the vicinity of Hamlet, as it prepares him imaginatively for fratricide—prepares him, that is, to become a Claudius figure. Michael’s dispatching of helpless brother Fredo in The Godfather, Part II, achieves that exact villainy and irredeemability. For more on Coppola’s Shakespeare connections, specifically the idea that King Lear operates intentionally within Coppola’s narrative, see Yvonne Griggs, “‘Humanity must perforce prey upon itself like monsters of the deep,’” Adaptation vol. 1. 2 (September 2008): 121–139; and Phoebe Poon, “The Corleone Chronicles: Revisiting The Godfather Films as Trilogy,” Journal of Popular Film & Television vol. 33.4 (January 2006): 187–195.
- 29.
Although Michael Corleone achieves a level of worldly success and moral dilapidation that Hamlet can but dream, both men are ensnared in murder’s net, killing where and what they did not fully intend: Michael ends his trilogy with partial responsibility for the death of his beloved and largely innocent daughter. Coppola was intentionally channeling the fate of King Lear and Cordelia here. It matters that the most profound conscious debt to Shakespeare in Coppola produces the least artistically successful film.
- 30.
For some suggestive parallels between theatrical and cinematic form, see Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” in Silver and Ursini, Gangster Film Reader, 15. James Loehlin offers some insightful connections between Richard III and the gangster movie (in particular, Richard Loncraine’s 1996 adaptation of the play) in ways that anticipate my reading of The Godfather as a bias interpretation of Hamlet. Loncraine clearly sees Shakespeare’s notorious king as a gangster, whereas any connection between Michael Corleone and Hamlet can only be inferential. See Loehlin, “‘Top of the World, Ma’: Richard III and Cinematic Convention,” in Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the plays on film, TV, and video, eds. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 67–79.
For a reading of several films around mythic archetypes (“Masculine Monsters,” “Unorthodox Messiahs”) see Geoffrey Hill, Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1992).
- 31.
Nico Dicecco, “The Aura of Againness: Performing Adaptation,” in Thomas Leitch, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (Oxford UP, 2017), 607–21; p. 619. Dicecco writes that what constitutes an adaptation is “an effect of both the text itself and prior textual, intertextual, and extra-textual knowledge and beliefs” (615).
The opening line of The Godfather sets the stage for the theme of national decay: “I believe in America. America’s made my fortune” (00:40). The speaker is not a criminal, but a gravedigger—the undertaker tellingly named Amerigo Bonasera.
- 32.
I have consulted the Internet Movie Database’s “Top 250 Movies as voted by our users,” at http://www.imdb.com/chart/top (consulted May 17, 2019). Considering that a minimum of 25,000 votes are required for a film to make the list, it is of course possible that someone’s favorite movie was once a Shakespeare play. Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, an adaptation of King Lear, is, at #137 on this list, the only entry of a clear Shakespeare adaptation on any such compilation that I have found. Given that this film is neither a direct nor an English language adaptation, and that its translation of Shakespeare to feudal Japan makes some thorough changes, it could qualify as the kind of film I discuss in this book, but its Shakespeare quotations and recursions are well known. The IMDB list includes several of the not-obviously-Shakespeare films I discuss in this book (Godfather, at #2; Godfather 2, #3; The Dark Knight, #4; Memento, #51; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, #146); other slant creations on the IMDB are The Lion King (1994) at #45; and at #47, Gladiator (2000), an unacknowledged transfiguration of Coriolanus, the story of a formerly honored fighter who becomes an enemy of the state. (A clue to the connection: John Logan, screenwriter for Gladiator, also wrote the screenplay for Coriolanus, dir. Ralph Fiennes, 2011). Some Like it Hot (dir. Billy Wilder, 1959), a neatly imagined non-adaptation of Twelfth Night, sits at #118. It is the nature of such cinema that many films may eventually be seen as constituting Shakespearean circuit productions, but their alliances have not yet been uncovered.
Other lists, including the “Top 100 Movies of All Time,” at https://www.filmcrave.com/list_top_movie_100.php; “Filmsite’s 100 Greatest (American) Films,” at http://www.filmsite.org/momentsindx.html; and BFI’s film critics’ poll of greatest films (available at http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/critics), similarly and typically exclude straight Shakespeare adaptations. Even Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), which garnered the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor, the first non-American film and still the only Shakespeare adaptation to do so, still lacks for popularity if these polls are any fair indication. The American Academy has a slightly more generous view of Shakespeare movies than other organizations, although the indirect overt adaptation is more to their liking: Best Picture awards for West Side Story (1961) and Shakespeare in Love (1998) suggest a Shakespearean accommodation. The first is a famous reworking of Romeo and Juliet, the second a creative hybrid of Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night.
- 33.
On this long relationship, spanning nearly the whole history of cinema, see especially Kenneth Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: a Century of Film and Television (Cambridge, U.K., New York: Cambridge UP, 1999).
- 34.
See Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 30–52.
- 35.
As far as deliberate rethinkings of the plays, I exempt from this claim the movies of Akira Kurosawa, whose versions of Hamlet, King Lear, and especially Macbeth are perhaps the most impressive conscious transformations of Shakespearean imaginings in the cinematic canon.
- 36.
Margaret Kidnie writes of the overlapping categories of theatrical production and cinematic adaptation; see her Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (Routledge, 2009).
- 37.
A worthy appreciation for some of these filmed Shakespeares, deriving from poststructural theory and aesthetics, can be found in Simon Ryle, Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire: Adaptation and Other Futures of Shakespeare’s Language (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). See especially the chapter on Hamlet, 129–73.
- 38.
James Newlin has recently proposed in just these terms that the bleak television comedy Vice Principals reconceives Othello and demonstrates a “striking fidelity to its source text.” Such fidelity is not my interest here, but his analysis is amenable to a non-adaptational reading. James Newlin, “Foul Pranks: Recognizing Vice Principals as a Comic Othello,” Shakespeare Bulletin 36.2 (2018): 197–223; p. 197.
- 39.
Weir tends to choose scripts that partake, in whole or part, of Tempest elements; his first great critical success, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), features a character named Miranda who vanishes in a sexually oppressive, mysterious landscape, a mise-en-scene ripe for Shakespearean analogy.
- 40.
Walter Metz, Engaging Film Criticism: Film History and Contemporary American Cinema (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 183–93. Conkie analyzes parallels between The Merchant of Venice and the surprising refigurations of Shylock in the films Tropic Thunder, Borat, and Star Wars Episode 1—The Phantom Menace. See Rob Conkie, “Shakespeare Aftershocks: Shylock,” Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol. 27.4 (Winter 2009): 549–566. I have elsewhere interpreted Independence Day and Starship Troopers through the Shakespearean lens of fear about the alien invasion (and infiltration) that Jews often represent; see Eric S. Mallin, “Jewish Invader and the Soul of State: The Merchant of Venice and Science Fiction Movies,” in Hugh Grady, ed., Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (London and NY: Routledge, 2000), 142–67.
- 41.
Barbara Correll, “Chaste Thinking, Cultural Reiterations: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and The Letter,” in Desmet, Loper, and Casey, eds., Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, 131–47. See also in the same collection, for some relevant comments about coincidental similarities between texts, the essay by Scott Hollifield, “Dead for a Ducat: Shakespearean Echoes (and an Accident) in Some Films of James Cagney,” 187–202.
- 42.
Supra, n. 13. They are only “hidden,” of course, if someone means to hide them—which is to say, if they are covert adaptations. As I say, I deny that they can be labeled this way.
- 43.
For “revisionary” and “unacknowledged” or “subjective” as designations, see Christopher L. Morrow, “Acknowledgment, Adaptation and Shakespeare in Ron Rash’s Serena,” South Central Review 30.2 (2013): 136–61; for “unannounced,” see John R. Severn, “All Shook Up and the Unannounced Adaptation: Engaging with Twelfth Night’s Unstable Identities,” Theatre Journal 66 (2014): 541–57. Morrow’s designations refer to a novel and Severn’s to a play as their prior texts. In his “Afterword” to the volume Shakespeare/ Not Shakespeare, Douglas Lanier addresses some of the work I and others have done in this mode; “unmarked” adaptations is his term for them. Lanier, “Afterword,” in Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, 293–303; pp. 300–02.
- 44.
R.S. White, Shakespeare’s Cinema of Love: A Study in Genre and Influence (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2016). I thank Scott Newstok (private communication) for this reference and many other indispensable contributions to my bibliography and argument.
White telegraphed his Shakespeare-spotting with a reading of Stephen Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) as an elaboration on Othello—a connection that he significantly calls, as I do the circuit version, not “a source relationship but an analogical one.” R.S. White, “Sex, Lies, Videotape—and Othello,” in Keller and Stratyner, eds., Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television, 86–98; p. 86.
- 45.
Our projects overlap in idea, not in method or texts. But it would be easy to see, for example, my Chap. 3 on Cameron’s Titanic as in line with White’s analysis; indeed, the film takes its place within an entire rubric that White identifies as “the Romeo-and-Juliet genre” (178).
Titanic is close enough to Shakespeare to have found its way into Douglas Lanier’s category of Romeo and Juliet adaptations, or rather “Film Spin-offs and Citations,” in his contribution to Shakespeares After Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, ed. Richard Burt, 2 vols. (Connecticut and London: Greenwood P 2007), 1:132–365; see 1:293. The Godfather , Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Memento do not make Lanier’s remarkably voluminous group of allusions and variants (overall, 1047 entries), which is only to suggest that there are more bias versions of Shakespeare than are dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy. The other films I study here postdate this Lanier compendium. Incidentally, he summarizes 148 films that count as spin-offs, or contain substantial citations, of Hamlet.
- 46.
Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981). The most thorough assessment of Cavell’s Shakespearean encounters appears in Lawrence Rhu, Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies (New York: Fordham UP, 2006). See also Douglas Bruster’s brief discussion in Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln, Neb. and London: Nebraska UP, 2000) 193–95; and Samuel Crowl’s, in Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2003), 66–68. R.S. White’s Shakespeare’s Cinema of Love acknowledges the debt; he also makes some departures from Cavell (see 12–13, 51–70).
- 47.
“The Thought of Movies,” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 87–106; p. 95.
- 48.
“The Thought of Movies,” 95.
- 49.
S.v. “Apophenia,” in The Skeptic’s Dictionary; available at http://skepdic.com/apophenia.html. The word is not in the OED.
- 50.
See Rhu on Cavell’s “attempt to account for the absence of children in the genre of remarriage comedy” (54), in which Cavell has greater recourse to Milton than to Shakespeare. Rhu’s comprehensive discussion of Cavell’s reading of The Winter’s Tale is more sympathetic than mine (136–171).
- 51.
Paul Siegel, Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (Notre Dame and London: U of Notre Dame P, 1968), 200.
- 52.
See Eric S. Mallin, Godless Shakespeare (London: Continuum, 2007), 65–74.
- 53.
Cavell elsewhere notes that the remarriage theme can be detected meaningfully in Antony and Cleopatra, which in its bold and anomalous way establishes a form of late-life wedding. See “Two Cheers for Romance,” in Cavell on Film, 153–66, especially pp. 155–57.
- 54.
“North by Northwest,” in Cavell on Film, 41–58; p. 46. Cavell makes a surprisingly similar argument for quality or competence in asserting that Frank Capra’s work is comparable in some respects to that of Wittgenstein, Emerson, and Whitman; it shares their “ambitions and specific visions.” See “A Capra Moment” in Cavell on Film, 135–143; 142–43.
- 55.
Pursuits of Happiness, 142–45. Here he forges perplexing analogies between the film and the play that I recognize as a hazard of doing work such as this. He considers his own strained results, and strangely ratifies them:
But granted some more or less specific relation to Shakespeare’s romantic comedy, does it help to think of C.K. Dexter Haven [the romantic lead character in The Philadelphia Story] as Oberon? The bare possibility of the question brings out the fact of Dexter’s quality of authority, unmistakable if intangible, as something to which criticism must assign significance. I mention in passing that Oberon is invisible to mortals, as is the figure of the film director for whom, as I have claimed, Dexter, among other things, is a surrogate. (Pursuits of Happiness, 145)
The problems with this line of reasoning are patent, but they lead to worthwhile questions about interpretive validity. Can a pre-interpreted figure (the character who is putatively a surrogate for the invisible, authoritative film director) really bolster a reading (of The Philadelphia Story as an attenuated version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream) that depends, as it happens, on the pre-interpretation for its legitimacy? Or rather, must it?
- 56.
Cavell, “The Thought of Movies,” 94.
Works Cited
Bruster, Douglas. Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama. Lincoln, Neb. and London: Nebraska UP, 2000.
Burt, Richard ed. Shakespeares After Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. 2 volumes. Connecticut and London: Greenwood P, 2007.
Cartelli, Thomas. “Doing it Slant: Reconceiving Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath.” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 26–36.
Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan. Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Cattrysse, Patrick. Descriptive Adaptation Studies: Epistemological and Methodological Issues. Antwerp: Garant, 2014.
Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.
———. “A Capra Moment.” In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005, 135–43.
———. “North by Northwest.” In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005, 41–58.
———. “The Thought of Movies.” In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005, 87–106.
Clarens, Carlos. “All in the Family: The Godfather Saga.” In Silver and Ursini, eds. Gangster Film Reader. Pompton Plains, N.J., Limelight Editions, 2007, 107–115.
Cohn, Ruby. Modern Shakespeare Offshoots. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976.
Conkie, Rob. “Shakespeare Aftershocks: Shylock.” Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol. 27.4 (Winter 2009): 549–566.
Correll, Barbara. “Chaste Thinking, Cultural Reiterations: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and The Letter.” In Desmet et. al., Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, 131–47.
Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2003.
Desmet, Christy, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey, eds. Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. NY: Palgrave, 2017.
Dicecco, Nico. “The Aura of Againness: Performing Adaptation.” In Thomas Leitch, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017, 607–21.
Evans, G. Blakemore et al. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Follows, Stephen. https://stephenfollows.com/movies-based-on-shakespeare-plays/. Website. 2019.
Georgopoulou, Xenia. The body as text in Shakespeare’s plays: the fashioning of the sexes. Lewiston, N.Y. Edwin Mellen P, 2011.
Griggs, Yvonne. “‘Humanity must perforce prey upon itself like monsters of the deep.’” Adaptation vol. 1. 2 September 2008: 121–139.
Holderness, Graham. “Textual Shakespeare.” In Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier and Jorg Helbig, eds., Sh@kespeare in the Media: From the Globe Theatre to the World Wide Web, 2nd Edn. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010, 55–71.
Hollifield, Scott. “Dead for a Ducat: Shakespearean Echoes (and an Accident) in Some Films of James Cagney.” In Desmet et. al. eds., Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, 187–202.
Howard, Tony. “Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots.” In Russell Jackson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 295–313.
Kawin, Bruce. How Movies Work. Berkeley, California. U of California P, 1992.
Keller, James R. and Leslie Stratyner, eds. Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television. North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 2004.
Kidnie, Margaret. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. Routledge, 2009.
Lanier, Douglas. “Film Spin-offs and Citations.” In Burt, ed. Shakespeares After Shakespeare. Volume 1:132-365.
———. “Afterword.” In Desmet, et. al. Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, 293–303.
Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (2003): 149–71.
———. Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.
———, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017.
Lewis, Rhodri. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017.
Lidz, Theodore. Hamlet’s Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet. N.Y.: Basic Books, 1975.
Loehlin, James. “‘Top of the World, Ma’: Richard III and Cinematic Convention.” In Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the plays on film, TV, and video, eds. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 67–79.
Mallin, Eric S. “Jewish Invader and the Soul of State: The Merchant of Venice and Science Fiction Movies.” In Hugh Grady, ed. Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium. London and NY: Routledge, 2000, 142–67.
———. Godless Shakespeare. London: Continuum, 2007.
Metz, Walter. Engaging Film Criticism: Film History and Contemporary American Cinema. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.
Minton, Eric. “Birdman and Shakespeare: A Life of Delusions Takes Flight.” Website. http://www.shakespeareances.com/dialogues/commentary/Birdman_Shakespeareances-150219.html. Feb. 20, 2015.
Morrow, Christopher L. “Acknowledgment, Adaptation and Shakespeare in Ron Rash’s Serena.” South Central Review 30.2 (2013): 136–61.
Poon, Phoebe. “The Corleone Chronicles: Revisiting The Godfather Films as Trilogy.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 33.4 (January 2006): 187–195.
Puzo, Mario. The Godfather. New York: G.B. Putnam’s Sons, 1969.
Rhu, Lawrence. Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies. New York: Fordham UP, 2006.
Rothwell, Kenneth. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: a Century of Film and Television. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Ryle, Simon. Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire: Adaptation and Other Futures of Shakespeare’s Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2016.
Severn, John R. “All Shook Up and the Unannounced Adaptation: Engaging with Twelfth Night’s Unstable Identities.” Theatre Journal 66 (2014): 541–57.
Siegel, Paul. Shakespeare in His Time and Ours. Notre Dame and London: U of Notre Dame P, 1968.
Silver, Alain and James Ursini, eds. Gangster Film Reader. Pompton Plains, N.J. Limelight Editions, 2007.
Sundelson, David. Shakespeare’s Restorations of the Father. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1983.
“Two Cheers for Romance.” In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman. Albany: State University of New York P, 2005, 153–66.
Warshow, Robert. “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” In Silver and Ursini, Gangster Film Reader. 11–18.
Welsh, James M. “What is a ‘Shakespeare Film,’ Anyway?” In James M. Welsh and Peter Lev, eds., The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow P), 105–114.
White, R.S. “Sex, Lies, Videotape—and Othello.” In Keller and Stratyner, eds., Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television, 86–98.
———. Shakespeare’s Cinema of Love: A Study in Genre and Influence. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2016.
Willson, Robert F. Shakespeare in Hollywood, 1929–1956. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP/Associated University Presses, 2000.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mallin, E.S. (2019). Shakespeare in the Movies: Meaning-Making in the Non-Adaptation. In: Reading Shakespeare in the Movies. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28898-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28898-3_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-28897-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28898-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)