ABSTRACT
The rest of this book discusses the plays as they are read or seen in the theatre. But many more people encounter Shakespeare’s plays in the cinema or on television, or on DVDs or downloads of Shakespeare films. Yet film represents the world in a totally different way from theatrical representation in 1600 (see above, pp.48ff.). Film is an art form whose very nature requires words to be subordinate to the visual image; in Shakespeare’s theatre, words rule. This chapter looks at how the challenge of turning the play text into a successful film can reveal much about the nature of both Shakespeare’s theatre, and about the nature of that most apparently ‘modern’ medium, film. I will look at a couple of different approaches to screen adaptation in the case of The Tempest, but also at how Shakespeare has become a brand in the globalized culture of the moving image in the twenty-first century.
