Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Shakespeare, films and the marketplace
- Part I Adaptation and its Contexts
- Part II Genres and Plays
- 5 The comedies on film
- 6 Filming Shakespeare’s history: three films of Richard III
- 7 Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear on film
- 8 The tragedies of love on film
- Part III Directors
- Part IV Critical Issues
- Further Reading
- Filmography
- Index
- Series List
5 - The comedies on film
from Part II - Genres and Plays
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2007
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Shakespeare, films and the marketplace
- Part I Adaptation and its Contexts
- Part II Genres and Plays
- 5 The comedies on film
- 6 Filming Shakespeare’s history: three films of Richard III
- 7 Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear on film
- 8 The tragedies of love on film
- Part III Directors
- Part IV Critical Issues
- Further Reading
- Filmography
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Compared with screen versions of the tragedies and histories, there have been few distinguished films based on the comedies. Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) may be the only film in this genre to be acclaimed for its pioneering cinematography, and Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice (2004) are the only three to have achieved popular (if not necessarily critical) success: the first for its use of actors (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) who were the co-supremes of their age, the second for cameo performances by photogenic stars, high spirits and picturesque settings, and the third for fine cinematography and superb performances from Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino. Shakespeare’s comedies create relationships with their theatre audiences for which very few directors have managed to find cinematic equivalents, and it is not surprising that some of the comedies (The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Two Gentlemen of Verona) have not been filmed in sound and in English for the cinema (although a couple have been the basis of adaptations).
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film , pp. 87 - 101Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007