ABSTRACT
This book might be called a diversion. Certainly it deals with a subject which is unconventional for an academic who has spent much of his life teaching English literature to college and university students and whose publications, until he began gathering material for the book, had little to do with films. It has been a diversion in another sense too, a distraction from other and more customary forms of research and writing, a recreation, and on the whole great fun . . . Yet it is not so much a diversion as might be thought. I have been teaching Shakespeare for forty years and writing about the drama and stage for almost as long, and I have seen a great many films from the early days of cinema to the present.
