What’s in a Name? Or, Something like an Introduction

Abstract

The best titles, one is warned, usually consist of a word or two, the subtitle being unnecessary or safely tucked away from the marquee offered by a cover, and fitted in small type at the foot of an interior page. Yet if one is to propose an adequate theory of film adaptation, as I propose to do, these are unavoidable terms, and their darker import, as much as the light they shed, should be clear from the outset. My method has been to introduce a topic by addressing a series of questions. What meaning does Shakespeare have in different linguistic, national, and cultural contexts? What benefits might Film Studies derive by applying a wealth of Shakespeare adaptations to its own historical and theoretical assumptions? How can the foregoing discussion contribute to the emergent discourse of visual culture? And what bearing does a cinema derived from Shakespeare’s plays have on the heated debates concerning the nature of modernity? In the majority of instances, I have extracted examples from films only as needed; in others, paused to discuss entire films or parts of them at greater length when such discussions contribute materially to my argument. The novelistic headings to the chapters and to this introduction provide a narrative summary of these contents in an internal dialogue of sorts with the section breaks and captions. They are best read sempre leggiero, but with care.