Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T02:08:47.736Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Violence, Tragic and Comic, in Coriolanus and The Taming of the Shrew

from Part III - Critical Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2020

Russell Jackson
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Get access

Summary

The chapter considers tropes of violence in Coriolanus and The Taming of the Shrew. It examines some of the ways these have been shaped by cross-pollination among stage, cinema, and television. For Coriolanus this includes cinema’s increase in realistic cinematic violence and the profitable rise of action hero films. The screen makes highly visible the play’s physical violence marked by signifiers of masculinity: bleeding wounds (received or given in battle) and the scars they leave.Screen versions discussed include: televised Coriolanus broadcasts, one in Italy on RAI television (1965) and the other seen internationally through the BBC Shakespeare Series (1984); stage productions by France’sNational Populaire Villeurbanne (2006), and England’s Royal Shakespeare Company (2018); and Ralph Fiennes’s film (2011). The major films of The Taming of the Shrew include two mass-market movies starring celebrity couples, Mary Pickford/Douglas Fairbanks, directed by Sam Taylor (1927) and Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton directed by Franco Zeffirelli (1966), the BBC Shakespeare Series’ Shrew directed by Jonathan Miller (1980) and the Shakespeare Globe’s stage production (2012).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×