Shakespeare on Screen, A Review

Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear, edited by Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin

This collection of essays on King Lear on screen (Cambridge, 2019) assembles a dozen papers presented at a 2016 World Shakespeare Congress seminar and adds a brief afterword by Peter Holland and a reference guide of over 270 entries indexed to specific screen productions and adaptations of Shakespeare’s great tragedy. Three additional online essays affiliated with the print collection are available as “resources” here.

This volume is the tenth in a series inaugurated in 2003 by editors Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin; it follows similar collections devoted to screen treatments of other plays (Richard III, Hamlet, etc.) or categories (the Henriad, televised Shakespeare, the Roman plays) published over the last decade and more. As might be anticipated with such a project, its most obvious value is in making available the individual essays, which tend to be specific in their subject matter, though not infrequently more far-reaching in their ambitions and theoretical heft. For example, we have a study of three film versions of the Fool, a focused analysis of screen versions of the “Dover Cliff” scene, and a number of essays devoted to specific films everyone would think of—Kozintsev’s 1970 and Brook’s 1971 masterpieces, Ran (1985), King of Texas (2002)—but also to some welcome surprises like The Yiddish King Lear (1934), Harry and Tonto (1974), Life Goes On (2009), and The Eye of the Storm (2011). In addition, because “screen” Shakespeare is broadly defined in this…