ABSTRACT
The rest of this book discusses the plays as they are read or seen in the theatre. In fact many more people encounter Shakespeare’s plays in the cinema or on television, or in video or DVD versions of Shakespeare films. Yet film drama represents the world in a totally different way from the theatre of early modern London. It is an art form whose very nature requires words to be subordinate to the visual image. This is the exact opposite of the nature of theatre in 1600. This chapter looks at how the challenge of turning the playtext into a successful film can reveal much about the nature of both Shakespeare’s theatre and about the medium of film. It will look in detail at four different ways of putting Shakespeare on screen, ranging from a ‘faithful’ rendering of an entire text of Hamlet to a playful modern reworking of The Taming of the Shrew.
