Shakespeare and the English-speaking Cinema is a lively, authoritative, and innovative overview of the ways in which Shakespeare's plays have been adapted for cinema. Organised by topics rather than chronology, it offers detailed commentary on significant films, including both 'mainstream' and 'canonical' works by such directors as Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Franco Zeffirelli, and Kenneth Branagh, and such ground-breaking movies as Derek Jarman's The Tempest, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books. Chapters on the location of films in...

In their own distinctive manner, each of the four actors discussed in this volume have had a profound and innovative influence on the methods of Shakespearean performance, and thus on the appreciation and interpretation of his plays. Their careers encompass almost a century of theatrical experience, from John Gielgud's childhood before the First World War to Judi Dench's performances in the first decades of the new millennium. The volume affords invaluable insights into changing approaches to the actor's craft, the aims and methods of the theatre, the institutions presenting productions and,...