Taking all that into account, the filmmaker does not end up with a version of a Shakespeare play: she ends up with a story taken from an idea by Shakespeare that expresses her own intentions as a filmmaker. The more they do that the more they depart from Shakespeare’s meanings. Most filmmakers working with a Shakespeare text change the order of the scenes, they take lines out of a scene and plant it into a different scene and they cut whole scenes out. Stories are about people – their actions, their words, their intentions, their motivations and their interactions with others. Shakespeare places each scene in a position in the text that will tell the story in a way that will reflect his intentions. But the chance of coming anywhere near Shakespeare’s intentions, or the effect of the play on the audience, is nil if half his words are cut out.Įvery Shakespeare play has a story or plot. The exclusion of half of the words, therefore, requires a series of judgments. Every single word of a Shakespeare text is necessary to the author’s meaning or he would not have included it. That in itself causes a huge landslide of the original meaning, that inevitably obscures or conceals, or at least changes, Shakespeare’s intentions. When a film writer adapts a Shakespeare play for the big screen she has to make it of much shorter duration, invariably having to cut up to half of the beautiful poetry that makes up the Shakespeare text. These days filmmakers will occasionally make an adaptation of a play or a novel only if they have a good reason to do so. In an adaptation the adaptor takes the original work and bends and twists it into a very different medium, finally arriving at some kind of version of the original, but transposed to something new – a film, with all its own traditions and conventions, which are different from those of novels and plays. Until then most films were adaptations of novels or plays. The Australian director, Justin Kurzel, made a film version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 2015 which starred Michael Fassbinder and Marion Cotillard.ĭuring the last half-century, original screenplays have become the norm. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.
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